I often think about Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, perhaps more so now than ever.
Benjamin’s angel, Klee’s angel,
who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched… His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.
Benjamin’s storm is totalising. This is hardly surprising, given his theses on history were written in Paris in 1940, only five months before the city fell under wartime occupation. The storm he saw approaching was about to engulf Europe, and later the whole world.
It is tragically ironic that Benjamin would still refer to this storm as the storm of “progress”. Given the wider context in which Benjamin was writing, it hardly feels progressive (in its more acutely political sense) at all. It is true, nonetheless, that time advances relentlessly. Perhaps this is the rub upon which his theses lie. Benjamin’s theses on history are at once loyal to a “historical materialism” and cynically disparaging of what it has become — which is, he suggests, little more than Marxism’s “mechanical Turk”.
We must remember that, for Marx and Engels:
The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure…
For Benjamin, as it must be for us, it is essential that we recognise the privileged modes of production that sustain our constant state of emergency. “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ’emergency situation’ in which we live is the rule”, he writes.
Then and now, the privileged modes of production are those that are most likely to lead to our destruction. Our plastic world, our world of military-grade metals, wherein economies are fuelled by the constant ramping up of the war machine. War becomes the basis of all social structure. This is the storm of “progress” in which we live, just as Benjamin did.
Klee’s angel starts to appear all too naive in his depiction. For all his admiration for the painting, Benjamin’s angel is perhaps better rendered as “biblically accurate”.
Most days, I find myself encased in the revolving eyes of this biblical storm. At the same time, I feel bereft watching worldly chaos unfold as if from far away. Periodically, I find myself rocked by destructive updrafts and downdrafts, tornados and hurricanes, hailstones and mesocyclones of debris. Other times, there is only a fog. There is seldom sun.
I feel a disparity between a historical gloom and the brightness of the present. Space-time loses all geometry in a storm. There is a feeling of falling constantly down a hole. But that sensation is not all. It cannot be all. It never is all.
Swept away by a storm blowing in from Palestine, we face the past constantly. All eyes on Palestine, it is not always easy to see the wider chain of events that are defining this moment in history. But the effect is not always melancholic; a sense of purpose arises from bearing witness to a catastrophe that the state seeks to ignore for the sake of its arms profiteering, which has led so many to intervene.
Joy and despair face off against each other. The jouissance of exposing horrors, holding power to account, is complicated and guilt-ridden. The sacrifices involved in the endeavour are real and pile up before us and behind us, but a liberated future supports our backs as well. Joy is not an act of resistance in and of itself, but resistance must make some room for some of it.
It is ironic that Paul Klee’s Angelus Nova is housed in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. It is an “icon of the left”, according to one historian, but Israel will claim ownership of anything even tangentially related to a messianic Judaism.
What might we suspect the Israelis see when looking at it? The Palestinians no doubt see one single Nakba, unceasingly piling rubble upon rubble. Like so many things the Israelis lay a claim to, in every act of expropriation is an ironic confession.
On Monday 3rd August, I returned to Newcastle after a weekend in London. My time down south included a visit to Bronzefield to see Amu, whose infectious laughter still rings in my ears alongside their eloquent investigations of a “material literacy”.
Unable to sleep that night, haunted by the brown monoliths of boxes in the corner of every room, I called Juno. We wandered down a Wikipedia rabbit hole, from tornadoes and hurricanes to the Great Thunderstorm and ball lightning.
I have always wanted to be a storm-chaser, I remind them. My social-media algorithm knows this and shows me pictures of supercells often. The destruction they wreak upon the earth is only one part of their awe-inspiring attraction. What truly fascinates me, beyond their physical might, is the fact that we are still not certain how such storms form.