Walter Benjamin and the Subject of Historical Cognition

As the proverb has it, ‘tradition is not to preserve the ashes but to pass on the flame’. Taking this image as a starting point, this paper is interested in non-conservative concepts of tradition and (dis)continuity. If the concept of tradition is normally associated with continuity, the concept of tradition poses the question of transmittability. Is there a continuous medium in which narrations, customs, rites or other material practices can be handed down from the past to the present? If the transmittability of tradition is not a given, a commodified object, but subject to historical change, the question of tradition and inheritance is inextricably linked to social and political struggles. The concept of tradition, however, has mostly been theorized by conservative thinkers. In this vein, traditional historical materialism viewed tradition as a counter-progressive retarding force. Walter Benjamin (1940), however, proposed a different concept of historical time and tradition. History is not based on a progressive flow of “homogeneous, empty time” but on disruptive constellations of the present and the past. The past is never fully gone; it can never be fully historicized. The medium in which the present is connected to all lost causes and struggles of those who literally and metaphorically lost their histories is called the “tradition of the oppressed.” Paradoxically, this medium is a discontinuum – its texture is woven out of struggles, empty-spots and disconnected elements which cannot be represented in one transmittable image or inscribed into one multifaceted yet coherent world-history. If the “tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living” (Marx), then the tradition of the oppressed will also haunt all attempts to repress it completely and erase its experience in the linear continuum of “victor’s history.” But how are we to pass on an oppressed tradition? How can the tradition of the oppressed be recalled, actualized and “worked through”?

2016

curiosity" that vary among historians. 1 "Cause," as historians use the term, indicates what the historian regards as something abnormal, "a differencemaker" to an outcome about which the historian cares and imagines an audience might care. 2 For example, at least one central topic of political and social history is how comparatively stable and satisfying forms of settled political life have or have not been established, where, for what periods of time, and by what means. This topic can scarcely be addressed without some general conception of what morph into morality [and vice versa]. 3 In general, then, between the articulation of political ideals and the development of historical understanding of political life there is and should be bootstrapping mutual influence. But how-and in particular how, now, within modern, settled political societies, with highly complex and articulated divisions of labor-can this bootstrapping mutual influence take place productively? That is, what are the ideals of settled political life that can be fruitful now for historical understanding? And what form of historical understanding can now both inform and be fruitful for political imagination? These are extraordinarily large, abstract questions. To give them some further shape and focus, five significant qualifications are in order. hunter-gatherers. 7 However, while he is surely right about the facts, Diamond also misunderstands what Aristotle meant. What is natural to human beings, according to Aristotle, is the condition under which their defining rational capacities can flourish, and the flourishing of these rational capacities-for language, for art, for theoretical understanding, for culture in general, for longterm planning and end-setting, for the development of technology, and so forthclearly requires, as Diamond accepts, the existence of settled life within larger political communities. These five significant qualifications-legitimate variability of historical subject matters and narrative forms; restriction to large normative, political questions about settled modern societies; and leaving sheer accidents, biologicalenvironmental influences, and technological developments out of account as less than fully dispositive for the large shape of social life-may seem at first glance One might be tempted to argue that this claim about the intertwining of the actual with the narratively formed and normatively assessed is mistaken. There are, after all, sheerly material happenstances-for example, lightning strikes or virus mutations-that affect human historical life from outside, as it were. Likewise, our powers to organize events narratively and to assess them normatively are to some extent free of materiality, in being driven in part by This condition is, further, necessary, not sufficient, for adequate historical narration. Or, more precisely, what it is relevantly to explain an action historically must be further specified. Just what sort of explanation is in view, when we are explaining events-or at least the significant actions of human agents within settled political societies-historically? A first step to answering this question is to see that events must be assigned significance by way of an action description. "To ask for the significance of an event, in the historical sense of the term, is to ask a question which can only be answered in the context of a story. The identical event will have a different significance in accordance with the story in which it is located or, in other words, in accordance with what different sets of later events it may be connected. Stories constitute the natural context in which events acquire historical (p.19) significance." 19 Hence, when knowledge of a relevant semantics"; 35 and hydro-semantics collapses in the face of the muteness of the (p.25) brutely physical about attitudes, in contrast with the holism, reasonableness, and normativity of the psychological. Because actions, as opposed to mere bodily reactions and other brute physical events, are undertaken and performed only by rational-enough agents to whom some ensemble of coherently sustained commitments (aims, beliefs, projects, etc.) can be ascribed over time, the kind of explanation that is available for them, while in some sense causal, is not open to the kind of precisification, 1.4. Fundamental Terms of Description and Explanation as Elicited Exactly what the relevant political and ethical ideals are; how specific, long-term activities in pursuit of them are responsive to considerations of reasonableness; and how the outcomes are properly normatively assessed-all this is far from transparent in immediate happenstances. Nor will it always or often help simply to ask individual agents what they are up to or to consult whatever records of their beliefs, desires, and aims they may happen to have left. Consulting such records is always relevant, but it is often not by itself decisive, since

This is a brief study of the importance of historical consciousness in the context of identity construct and self determination.

Religion Compass, 2009

The rise of the historical consciousness' represents a grand narrative that is closely linked to other meta-histories, especially modernization and secularization. The idea that critical thought about history arose uniquely in a certain place ( Europe, particularly Germany) and at a certain time (the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century) is widespread and powerful. As an ideology this notion, which is also known as historicism, actually operates in two principal directions. First, it poses a direct challenge to other powerful epistemological systems of the West, especially those supporting the establishments of science and religion. Second, historicism is a key element in the imperialism, cultural and otherwise, by means of which European and American societies have dominated the rest of the world in the capitalist age. Finally, this dual operation of historicism means not only that it has come in for much criticism, especially in recent decades, but that such criticism has come from both ends of the very wide spectrum in contemporary cultural politics. Rather confusingly, historicism remains both the darling and the bête noire of both 'conservative' theological apologists and 'radical' postcolonial critics.

Journal of Curriculum Studies, 2019

To make historical consciousness beneficial for history education research we need to disentangle its multidisciplinary backgrounds so that contradictory approaches and outcomes can be avoided. The aim of this article therefore is to clarify the enigma of its different paradigms. We will discuss two interrelated paradigms: one interpreting historical consciousness as a collective phenomenon that is characteristic for modern Western society, and the other treating historical consciousness on an individual level as a cognitive-epistemological category. We will show that several misunderstandings in educational research about historical consciousness result from the conflation of both conceptualisations and its underlying paradigms. Yet, by highlighting Hans-Georg Gadamer's notion of Wirkungsgeschichte (historical effect) we will argue that both conceptualisations are not entirely mutually exclusive. Including historically effected consciousness in the notion of historical consciousness does offer a wide range of opportunities, for history education scholars as well as history educators.

Given the popularity of historical consciousness within history education, we want to pause for reflection to consider the stakes, tenets, and presuppositions in taking on, continuing, and teaching, a type of historical consciousness.​ ​ We won't go through historical consciousness in all of its iterations, but will draw mostly from the work of Peter Seixas (2006a; 2006b; 2017) and his colleagues, as these texts have been the most prominent in teacher education and schooling in the Ontario context in which we (mostly) work. What we present here are our nascent theorizations through questioning what an antiracist and decolonizing historical consciousness would look like, or could possibly become. As we talked, read, wrote, and discussed the potentials of something like a 'decolonizing historical consciousness' or 'antiracist historical consciousness,' several themes or sticking points kept emerging that we wish to offer as a means of opening the conversation and troubling the slow sedimentation of historical consciousness.

Journal of Curriculum Studies

This article explores an underlying tension between two understandings of historical consciousness. On one hand, the concept is often perceived as a specific ability to historicize the world and thus appears as a modern cultural achievement. On the other hand, it is also conceptualized as an anthropological universal as the ability to make sense out of time seems to be a basic feature in all human societies. The basic aim here is to analyse both positions as theoretical constructs with implications for educational research and curriculum making. In order to frame how these ontological positions on historical consciousness have consequences at an operational level, the Goertz framework for complex concepts is used. This framework is applied to two previous studies that explored students' historical consciousness. The methodical assumption is that both the studies serve as exemplary indicators for the two different positions. My analysis of the studies shows how their conceptualization of historical consciousness restricts how they define their research interests. In the concluding part of this article, the analysis is used as a stepping stone to a broad and normative discussion on how historical consciousness could influence history education.

Critique, 2024

This article examines Lukács's theorisation of the unconscious-not as a libidinal or instinctual force, but as an epistemic and automatising mechanism that influences agents' actions. The study first addresses the need for Marxism to engage with the concept of the unconscious, drawing parallels with the psychoanalytic tradition. It then considers Lukács's conception of the historicity of consciousness and the process of reification that creates unconscious epistemic barriers. The paper further explores the potential of the oppressed class to overcome these barriers, and highlights strategies for consciousness-raising and transcending the unconscious in Lukács's later works. By providing a nuanced analysis of the intersection between Marxism and the unconscious, this article offers new insights into how unconscious processes affect agency and consciousness within a historical and social framework.

Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, 2009