Stories & Soliloquies

Tag: longreads

• Time, Temporality, and T. H. White

  Posted at 8:09 pm by Michelle Joelle, on July 11, 2016

  I am currently reading through T. H. White’s The Once and Future King for the very first time, and I must admit that as I read, I’m constantly distracted by thoughts about time, temporality, and how Merlyn can live backwards through time while still functionally conversing and building relationships. As someone who has long been interested in how literature can play with time and temporality, I’ve decided to share my thoughts, questions, and puzzles in the hopes that doing so will clear my mind of them. It’s a rich story, with many layers of satire and political commentary to work through and critique, but I just can’t seem to focus on anything but the mechanics of the story’s temporal flow.

  Note: I wrote this to an assumed audience of people who have read the novel rather than giving context for each example and question. I also wrote through my thought process, such that some of what I say early on I reject by the end.

  ———-

  Merlyn explains early on (p 35) how time works for him:

  …Now ordinary people people are born forwards in Time, if you understand what I mean, and nearly everything in the world goes forward too. This makes it quite easy for the ordinary people to live… But I unfortunately was born at the wrong end of time, and I have to live backwards from in front, while surrounded by a lot of people living forwards from behind. Some people call it having second sight…

  …You see, one gets confused with Time, when it is like that. All one’s tenses get muddled, for one thing. If you know what is going to happen to people, and not what has happened to them, it makes it difficult to prevent it happening, if you don’t want it to have happened, if you see what I mean?

  While I can understand the notion of “second sight”, the problem of conversation, which he indicates slightly here in his reference to tenses, remains a puzzle to me. Beyond the issue of word choice, temporal flow is an ordered thing, and so is the English language, and so if Merlyn is living backwards through time, does he a) say and hear all of his words backwards? Is “hello” “olleh” to him, as is suggested when he summons Neptune to turn the Wart into a perch (p 45)? The example reads thus:

  Snylrem stnemilpmoc ot enutpen dna lliw eh yldnik tpecca siht yob sa a hsif?

  Which rendered forwards reads:

  Merlyn’s compliments to Neptune and will he kindly accept this boy as a fish?

  This raises the next question, then, b) why aren’t the words presented in backwards order? Theoretically, Merlyn saying “Well hello there!” should actually be “!ereht olleh lleW” but this spell seems to hinge on just the words themselves being backwards as they fall in forwards order. Side question: does this mean that Neptune also progresses backwards through time? Because otherwise my next theory doesn’t quite work.

  One possibility is that Merlyn lives through snippets of time in a forward motion and then jumps back. This example indicates that the jump happens on a word by word basis, but if that were the mechanism, then he possibly would not be able to move temporally unless he was speaking. Or maybe he can control, at least to a certain extent, when he experiences things in a forward motion, and when he lets time pass him naturally. This could very well be related to his ability to leave the Wart with the Geese for what felt to Wart like days while only passing one night in Wart’s “real” life (p 170), and also for his ability to seemingly shift dimensions or travel through space:

  There was something magical about the time and space commanded by Merlyn, for the Wart seemed to be passing many days and night among the grey people, during the one spring night when he had left his body asleep under the bearskin.

  The question then remains to what extent he can control this, for his ability to answer questions seems to rely on it; perhaps he can live as much as a day in forward motion, but then wakes up a day earlier, which would give him just enough temporal congruency to build sensible conversations – for instance, how else would he be able to know that Wart was “Still sighing” (p 180) before he actually sighed (from a backwards temporal progress), or that the Wart is going to ask about the knighting ceremony? How else could he laugh at a joke or scoff at an inane remark?

  But that seems fundamentally wrong as well, for he laments when he meets the Wart for the first (for the last) time the limited time he has remaining (also p 35, appearing in between the two paragraphs I quote at the top of the post). Merlyn also here seems to be a little puzzled about the ordering of things, as if he is just simply living a consistent temporal flow just like our own, except in reverse, which is, I think, the real and confusing truth of the matter:

  “Have I told you this before?”

  “No, we only met about half an hour ago.”

  “So little time to pass?” said Merlyn, and a big tear ran down to the end of his nose. He wiped it off with his pajamas and added anxiously, “Am I going to tell it you again?”

  Besides completely breaking my heart, this scene is one that gave me pause – I read it over again a few times, and tried to imagine playing it out from Merlyn’s point of view. He knows the end of his tutelage of Arthur is coming, as I imagine that the Wart tells him of it later on when he is older and better understands Merlyn’s temporal flow (though I’ve not finished the book, even if it does not come up in the prose I can imagine it happens in an “off screen” moment). But where later on Merlyn always seems to know exactly what is coming and responds just exactly right, here he breaks a little, exposing the complexity and confusion of his temporal progress.

  If we were to experience it from his point of view, the ordering would be something like this (excepting for the backwards flow of individual words, for a moment, and sticking to phrases):

  “So little time to pass?” said Merlyn, and a big tear ran down to the end of his nose. He wiped it off with his pajamas and added anxiously, “Am I going to tell it you again?”

  “No, we only met about half an hour ago.”

  “Have I told you this before?”

  We can suppose that Merlyn, knowing the time already, asks only out of emotion, but there is in his demeanor a general sense of wishing to be contradicted, suggesting that his ability to converse is not solely based on reports from others about what has already been said. It seems rather that Merlyn is not only responding to the conversational points of his future (and our past), but that he is suggesting and engineering them to some degree.

  Let’s take another example from the end of Merlyn’s conversation with the Wart about the process of becoming a Knight, wherein he once again gets a bit confused (p 181-182). Here is the selection in forward motion:

  “If I were to be made a knight,” said the Wart, staring dreamily into the fire, “I should insist on doing my vigil by myself, as Hob does with his hawks, and I should pray to God to let me encounter all the evil in the world in my own person, so that if I conquered there would be none left, and, if I were defeated, I would be the one to suffer for it.”

  “That would be extremely presumptuous of you,” said Merlyn,” and you would be conquered, and you would suffer for it.”

  “I shouldn’t mind.”

  “Wouldn’t you? Wait till it happens and see.”

  “Why do people not think, when they are grown up, as I do when I am young?”

  “Oh dear,” said Merlyn. “You are making me feel confused. Suppose you wait till you are grown up and know the reason?”

  “I don’t think that is an answer at all,” replied the Wart, justly.

  Merlyn wrung his hands.

  “Well, anyway,” he said, “suppose they did not let you stand against all the evil in the world?”

  “I could ask,” said the Wart.

  “You could ask,” repeated Merlyn.

  He thrust he end of his beard into his mouth, stared tragically at the fire, and began to munch it fiercely.

  There are some aspects of this that are simple to comprehend. Merlyn knows what troubles the Wart will face in the future (Merlyn’s past), and feels the emotion of his memory. I am guessing that there is also some anxiety about protecting the Wart as long as possible, as he lamented back in his first (last) conversation with Wart (p 35): “If you know what is going to happen to people, and not what has happened to them, it makes it difficult to prevent it happening, if you don’t want it to have happened…”. But it also seems clear that this is not a conversation that Merlyn is going through by rote memory, but that is rather unfolding for him in the moment just as it is for the Wart. Let us look at the selection in reverse, once again by phrase rather than word (we are still reading in a forward motion, after all).

  He thrust he end of his beard into his mouth, stared tragically at the fire, and began to munch it fiercely.

  “You could ask,” repeated Merlyn.

  “I could ask,” said the Wart.

  “Well, anyway,” he said, “suppose they did not let you stand against all the evil in the world?”

  Merlyn wrung his hands.

  “I don’t think that is an answer at all,” replied the Wart, justly.

  “Oh dear,” said Merlyn. “You are making me feel confused. Suppose you wait till you are grown up and know the reason?”

  “Why do people not think, when they are grown up, as I do when I am young?”

  “Wouldn’t you? Wait till it happens and see.”

  “I shouldn’t mind.”

  “That would be extremely presumptuous of you,” said Merlyn,” and you would be conquered, and you would suffer for it.”

  “If I were to be made a knight,” said the Wart, staring dreamily into the fire, “I should insist on doing my vigil by myself, as Hob does with his hawks, and I should pray to God to let me encounter all the evil in the world in my own person, so that if I conquered there would be none left, and, if I were defeated, I would be the one to suffer for it.”

  It makes rather a lot of sense, as a conversation. It also makes sense, going “forward”, that Merlyn then goes on to describe the ceremony of achieving knighthood. Hearing the Wart speak of the vigil of knights would definitely prompt it. The meaning is quite different in this order, though – it is rather as if Merlyn is wistfully and hopelessly pondering a different future for the Wart than the one he knows will come to pass. Merlyn, giving in to the reality of what he cannot prevent, vaguely suggests that the Wart will understand when he is older. Then when the Wart asks about staying young in mind, Merlyn tells him he would be conquered, and suffer for it. But in this order, we see the Wart not cowed with caution against presumption, as seems to be Merlyn’s aim in the forward facing version of the conversation, but inspired to even greater and more tragic idealism, as he takes up a romanticized ideal of sacrificing himself for the sake of others.

  The mechanics of it all still elude me, but the sad beauty and magic of Merlyn’s reverse temporality have become more a little more evident to me through writing this, leaving me in a more pleasant state of puzzlement than before. This seems like a fine place to end this reflection, and get back to reading.
  Posted in Essays | 13 Comments | Tagged arthuriana, books, literature, longreads, philosophy, reading, T. H. White, temporality, The Once and Future King, time

• On Teaching and Learning

  Posted at 12:00 pm by Michelle Joelle, on March 11, 2015

  Over the past few weeks I’ve been collecting articles, posts, and quotes on the nature of teaching and learning with the idea that I would compile them into a longer essay. But as my list grew and my thoughts crystallized, I decided instead to keep my comments brief and let these vignettes take center stage. To put it succinctly, what all of these examples suggest is that teaching is not preaching, no matter what the subject, and that learning is far more than simply receiving knowledge – no matter how brilliant the source.

  First, from Richard Feynman on his time teaching teaching physics in Brazil:

  After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students had memorized everything, but they didn’t know what anything meant. When they heard “light that is reflected from a medium with an index,” they didn’t know that it meant a material such as water. They didn’t know that the “direction of the light” is the direction in which you see something when you’re looking at it, and so on. Everything was entirely memorized, yet nothing had been translated into meaningful words. So if I asked, “What is Brewster’s Angle?” I’m going into the computer with the right keywords. But if I say, “Look at the water,” nothing happens – they don’t have anything under “Look at the water”!

  Later on:

  I taught a course at the engineering school on mathematical methods in physics, in which I tried to show how to solve problems by trial and error. It’s something that people don’t usually learn, so I began with some simple examples of arithmetic to illustrate the method. I was surprised that only about eight out of the eighty or so students turned in the first assignment. So I gave a strong lecture about having to actually try it, not just sit back and watch me do it.

  After the lecture some students came up to me in a little delegation, and told me that I didn’t understand the backgrounds that they have, that they can study without doing the problems, that they have already learned arithmetic, and that this stuff was beneath them.

  So I kept going with the class, and no matter how complicated or obviously advanced the work was becoming, they were never handing a damn thing in. Of course I realized what it was: They couldn’t do it!”

  He draws an analogy between the way these students are being taught science and the act of learning a language merely by its sounds and rules:

  Then I gave the analogy of a Greek scholar who loves the Greek language, who knows that in his own country there aren’t many children studying Greek. But he comes to another country, where he is delighted to find everybody studying Greek – even the smaller kids in the elementary schools. He goes to the examination of a student who is coming to get his degree in Greek, and asks him, “What were Socrates’ ideas on the relationship between Truth and Beauty?” – and the student can’t answer. Then he asks the student, What did Socrates say to Plato in the Third Symposium?” the student lights up and goes, “Brrrrrrrrr-up” – he tells you everything, word for word, that Socrates said, in beautiful Greek.

  But what Socrates was talking about in the Third Symposium was the relationship between Truth and Beauty!

  What this Greek scholar discovers is, the students in another country learn Greek by first learning to pronounce the letters, then the words, and then sentences and paragraphs. They can recite, word for word, what Socrates said, without realizing that those Greek words actually mean something. To the student they are all artificial sounds. Nobody has ever translated them into words the students can understand.

  The entire essay is worth reading – actually, all of his essays in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman are – but these excerpts illustrate an attitude still present in a lot of educational environments.

  Second, an essay from Mere Inkling on C.S. Lewis and the transfer of knowledge:

  When I attended the University of Washington, we had to learn the old-fashioned way—by studying. Now they are anticipating downloading information directly into students’ brains.

  Literal brain dumps are actually still in the future . . . but researchers have documented the first indisputable brain-to-brain interface between humans!

  My first paragraph is not an exaggeration of what researchers think may one day happen.

  The project could also eventually lead to “brain tutoring,” in which knowledge is transferred directly from the brain of a teacher to a student.

  The student would view this shortcut as advantageous. (It could also save a great deal in tuition expenses, if each course only took, say, an hour or two of brain interfacing.)

  The university sees another advantage—circumventing limited teaching skills.

  “Imagine someone who’s a brilliant scientist but not a brilliant teacher. Complex knowledge is hard to explain – we’re limited by language,” said co-author Chantel Prat, a faculty member at the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences and a UW assistant professor of psychology.

  The editor of Mere Inkling, Robert Stroud, goes on to counter this idea with some questions and quotes form C. S. Lewis on education which are highly worth reading also, but my thoughts turn to the above-quoted Chantel Prat.

  Even if we were able to transfer knowledge in this way, we would fail to truly teach or learn by that method. As shown in Feynman’s experience, learning is not just about the collection of information, but rather training ourselves to figure it out. Teachers, when they’re good, guide their students through that discovery, and geniuses who come up with new and better ways to do things enable us to discover more things more quickly, but invariably, we still have to struggle through the process ourselves. Memorizing “2+2=4″ gives you no knowledge unless you can walk through the process yourself and then reapply it to other equations.

  Simply transferring the knowledge from the brain of the scientist to the brain of the student wouldn’t give you any better handle on the material than if the scientist said that same information out loud – it would still need to be unpacked and rebuilt by the student, helped by a teacher who can walk them through the process.

  Third, St. Augustine explains in De Magistro (Garry Wills translation) why teaching is so difficult, even when we have great knowledge:

  The most, then, that can be said for the scope of words is that they afford us an occasion for examining something, but they do not demonstrate it to our understanding. -36

  And later:

  Do teachers advertise that they verbally transmit their own acts of understanding, or the truths of their discipline, for students to receive and retain? What father sense a child to school with the silly aim of finding out what the teacher’s understanding is? Rather, when all subjects, even those concerning virtue and wisdom, have been expounded by those who profess them, then students, if they are really to be called that, investigate within themselves whether what they are hearing is true, strenuously putting it to the test of their own interior truth. That is the point at which they learn. And when they read an inner conviction of truth, they praise their teachers, not realizing that, even if the teachers knew what they were saying, the praise rightly belongs tot he taught ones not the ones who taught. – 45

  Even if you don’t believe we have an interior truth (either in terms of innate reason or in the image of God), the point is that knowledge is be gained by the experimentation or problem-solving act of the student, effectively prompted by the words of the teacher, but not executed by the teacher.

  Fourth, we see a similar rendering of this idea from Thomas Aquinas in De Veritate, Question 11:

  In effects which are produced by nature and by art, art operates in the same way and through the same means as nature. For, as nature heals one who is suffering from cold by warming him, so also does the doctor. Hence, art is said to imitate nature. A similar thing takes place in acquiring knowledge. For the teacher leads the pupil to knowledge of things he does not know in the same way that one directs himself through the process of discovering something he does not know.

  Now, in discovery, the procedure of anyone who arrives at the knowledge of something unknown is to apply general self-evident principles to certain definite matters, from these to proceed to particular conclusions, and from these to others. Consequently, one person is said to teach another inasmuch as, by signs, he manifests to that other the reasoning process which he himself goes through by his own natural reason. And thus, through the instrumentality, as it were, of what is told him, the natural reason of the pupil arrives at a knowledge of the things which he did not know. Therefore, just as the doctor is said to heal a patient through the activity of nature, so a man is said to cause knowledge in another through the activity of the learner’s own natural reason, and this is teaching. So, one is said to teach another and be his teacher. This is what the Philosopher means when he says: “Demonstration is a syllogism which makes someone know.”

  The teacher is here useful, but not necessary, for the act of learning.

  Fifth, we see this idea taken even further in a blog post from Book Geeks Anonymous on the damaging effects of teaching people that they need teachers:

  In an interview with CUNY TV, Irish poet Paul Muldoon advanced his theory for why so many people, particularly students, struggle to understand and enjoy poetry. According to Muldoon, it has to do with the way that poetry is taught in schools: in high school, he says, students are given the impression that they will never be able to understand poetry without a teacher or other sort of “expert” there to tell them what they’re reading.

  Muldoon makes a good point: most schools’ ways of teaching–not just poetry, but all subjects– cause students to doubt or neglect their own abilities. Because they, from the time they were waist-high, were spoon-fed their lessons, they become convinced that they cannot accomplish anything academic without involving a teacher. I believe college professors call this “freshman syndrome.” But this, I think, is only part of the reason why students struggle with poetry.

  When we make the teacher a source of knowledge, rather than a guide through the process of learning, we set very specific, arbitrary standards – teaching students not how to interpret poetry, but how to interpret the teacher, to find the “trick”, identify the “catch” in any question of evaluation. And we don’t just do this in the humanities.

  Sixth, another Feynman essay illustrates how we start this process early on, even in our elementary science textbooks:

  For example, there was a book that started out with four pictures: first, there was a wind-up toy; then there was an automobile’ then there was a boy riding a bicycle; then there was something else. And underneath each picture it said, “What makes it go?”

  I thought, “I know what it is: they’re going to talk about mechanics, how the springs work inside the toy; about chemistry, how the engine of the automobile works; and biology, about how the muscles work.”

  It was the kind of thing my father would have talked about: “What makes it go?” Everything does because the sun is shining,” And then we would have fun discussing it:

  “No, the toy goes because the spring is wound up,” I would say.

  “How did the spring get wound up?” he would aks.

  “I wound it up.”

  “And how did you get moving?”

  “From eating.”

  “And food grows only because the sun is shining. So it’s because the sun is shining that all these things are moving.” That would get the concept across that motion is simply the transformation of the sun’s power.

  I turned the page. The answer was, for the wind-up toy, “Energy makes it go.” And for the bicycle, “Energy makes it go.” For everything, “Energy makes it go.”

  Now that doesn’t mean anything. Suppose it’s “wakalixes.” That’s the general principle: “Wakalixes makes it go.” There’s no knowledge coming in. The child doesn’t learn anything: it’s just a word!”

  Even if it were the right word (and here Feynman argues vehemently that “energy” signifies far too broad of a concept to possibly be the right word), the word itself is merely a symbol representing a concept – learning the word by itself gives you nothing, and teaches students that the answer to a scientific question isn’t about figuring out how things work and why, but is instead about learning – or guessing – the right vocabulary word.

  Seventh, in offering a new way to teach shapes, Christopher from Talking Math with Kids, makes a similar claim about how vocabulary-centric learning often denies us conceptual learning:

  Most shapes books—whether board books for babies and toddlers, or more sophisticated books for school-aged children—are full of misinformation and missed opportunities. As an example, there is nearly always one page for squares and a separate one for rectangles. There is almost never a square on the rectangles page. That’s a missed opportunity. Often, the text says that a rectangle has two short sides and two long sides. That’s misinformation. A square is a special rectangle, just as a child is a special person.

  He goes on to describe a book of shapes that allows for children to think a bit more freely, and get a lot of new information – all without the arbitrary limitation of insisting on a set answer to a particular question. Each page displays four shapes, and asks the question: “Which one doesn’t belong?” And there are a variety of possible answers:

  If you are thinking, “It depends on how you look at it,” then you’ve got the idea… There is no answer key. This is intentional–to encourage further discussion, and to encourage you to return to the book to try again.

  The book will be available in PDF form for free download until the author makes it available for sale in hard copy.

  Eighth, we can trace this same pattern to the teaching of ethics and values by looking at a recently popular opinion article by Justin P. McBrayer in the New York Times questioning “Why our children don’t think there are moral facts”:

  This is repeated ad nauseum: any claim with good, right, wrong, etc. is not a fact.

  In summary, our public schools teach students that all claims are either facts or opinions and that all value and moral claims fall into the latter camp. The punchline: there are no moral facts. And if there are no moral facts, then there are no moral truths.

  However while I think this is a great essay, McBrayer himself falls into the exact trap he is criticizing. I agree with Self Aware Patterns’ dissatisfaction with McBrayer’s assumption that there are moral facts:

  I can certainly understand the strong desire for moral precepts to be facts similar to mathematical truths or scientific conclusions. I wish they were myself. It would make ethical debates so much easier. It would merely be a matter of testing a proposition or perhaps putting together a logical proof. But moral values can only be proven in relation to other moral values. Eventually, as you dig down through the moral axioms, you unavoidably hit a wall of subjectivity.

  He later adds that:

  Moral values are more than just whimsical opinion, but they don’t rise to the level of being absolute facts.

  What comes through is that the dualistic understanding of all knowledge as either “fact” or “opinion” is damagingly inadequate. In this case, the “fact/value” distinction is important, as is the “fact/opinion” distinction, but it is just as important to explore a “value/opinion” distinction, a “fact/axiom” distinction, a “fact/theory” distinction, a “theory/hypothesis” distinction, and more. Perhaps university is the right place to introduce these sorts of complexities, but I can’t help but think that it’s disingenuous – and damaging – to teach students that ideas are either correct facts you cannot question, or else utterly dismissible opinions that you cannot treat with rigor or respect.

  Generally speaking, when we treat teaching like the mere transfer of unquestionable data, school becomes a place to leave the real world (and the real way we do things) behind, leaving us no tools with which to apply whatever we do learn in class. Of course, facts and definitions and details are absolutely necessary for both clear communication and for guiding students quickly through discoveries that others have already struggled to make, but the goal should always be to enable students to go out of the classroom and use what they learn in both expected and unexpected ways – to stand on the shoulders of giants, not cower in their shadows.

  And of course, that is far easier said than done.
  Posted in Essays | 13 Comments | Tagged academia, aquinas, Augustine, de magistro, education, ethics, feynman, learning, links, longreads, morality, philosophy, quotes, selfawarepatterns, shapes, talking math with kids, teaching

• Philosopher Fridays: Walter Benjamin

  Posted at 1:00 pm by Michelle Joelle, on January 23, 2015

  Welcome to Philosopher Fridays, a now biweekly (or bimonthly, depending on your preference) series where I take a brief look at philosophers who’ve had an impact on my thinking, for good or ill. These posts are not meant to be comprehensive in any way, but instead are intended to provide a glimpse into an aspect of a thinker’s work that has stuck with me. For this post on the Arcades Project, I have drawn heavily from work I submitted for a graduate course on Benjamin and Adorno, and as such, I owe much of my understanding to the guidance of my professor.

  

  BENJAMIN: Walter Benjamin led a short and tragic life, leaving behind a trove of brilliant, unconventional philosophical writing. Born in 1892 to a wealthy Jewish family, Benjamin was a leftist literary critic who studied philosophy until his work was rejected by the University of Frankfurt. Shortly after this, he fled to Paris to escape the Nazis, spending his time writing essays and articles for the Institute for Social Research based back in Frankfurt. When the Nazis came to Paris, Benjamin’s attempts to flee to Spain were too arduous for him to complete, and he took his own life before reaching the border. He is often characterized as a Marxist, a critical theorist, a member of the Frankfurt school, a man of letters, and more, as his writings range widely in both style and topic, held together by a rejection of theoretical neatness. In all of his writing, he critiqued clean interpretations of literature and history, dialectic philosophy, and popularized art in all forms. He is most famous for his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction“.

  I plan to tackle this figure in multiple parts: this week, I will explore “Convolute N” of Benjamin’s Arcades Project,[1] “On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress,” which explores the opposition between the continuity of living history and the violent fragmentation of historical analysis, and in my next installment (and possibly the one after that), I will tackle some of his more popular essays. Without any further introduction, let’s dig in to what is known as his elementary doctrine of historical materialism.

  At its core, history as we think of it is inherently dialectical.

  The very contours of the positive element will appear distinctly only insofar as this element is set off against the negative. On the other hand, every negation has its value solely as background for the delineation of the lively, the positive… (N1a,3).

  What this means is that we see history only in fragments torn from their true contexts. History is both constantly moving and richly cross-connected, and so to isolate a moment or a story is to necessarily fragment it and set it necessarily agaisnst both its progressive chronology, and its horizontal context. This fragment is the dialectical image, crystallized for examination, drawing the uninterrupted flow of history into sharp distinction with its unnatural fixity. The dialectical image of any history is thus, for Benjamin, a negation of truly lived ephemeral history, which is rich in both linear and non-linear motion.

  This does not necessarily mean that a history is a negative, set against the flowing positive of lived experience. On the contrary:

  (1) An object of history is that through which knowledge is constituted as the object’s rescue. (2) History decays into images, not into stories. (3) Wherever a dialectical process is realized, we are dealing with a monad. (4) The materialist presentation of history carries along with it an immanent critique of the concept of progress. (5) Historical materialism bases its procedures on long experience, common sense, presence of mind, and dialectics. (On the monad: N10a,3). (N11,4).

  In this case, it is the natural transience of historical flow that is posited as the negative, with the crystallized dialect framed as an object rescued from the rubble of chronological decay. We then, according to Benjamin, take that ragged crystal and reframe it for ourselves as a whole object – a neat narrative to serve as a fixed marker. Whenever we look at history, we’re necessarily looking at a fragmented “image”, or a ruin bereft of its context – a picture, a likeness that bears resemblance but which will always be, inherently, a false representation of something that can no longer be truly present.

  Let’s break it down.

  1. The first tenet of elementary doctrine of historical materialism is rescue. To think as a historian is to break from the temporal flow of the now and attempt to catch hold of a moment as it either flows past, or to draw it up as it is already past:

  …the historian today has only to erect a slender but sturdy scaffolding—a philosophic structure—in order to draw the most vital aspects of the past into his net… (N1a,1).

  What are caught in the historian’s net are the remnants of historical decay, which the historian aims to grasp objectively.

  2. The second tenet is that history decays into images, rather than stories. The important difference there is that stories are constructs of successive narrative, and are to be experienced as though you are in the story, while images are singular and whole, and are to be looked at from without. To view an image is see an entirety, and though the inner details may elude the historian at a first glance, the interpretive meanings and nuances of the image are internally contained, and are outside of the historian’s experience. The dialectical image is the petrification of history, and indeed, of historical thinking:

  To thinking belongs the movement as well as the arrest of thoughts. Where thinking comes to a standstill in a constellation saturated with tensions—there the dialectical image appears. It is the caesura in the movement of thought. Its position is naturally not an arbitrary one. It is to be found, in a word, where the tension between the dialectical opposites is greatest. Hence, the object constructed in the materialist presentation of history is itself the dialectical image. The latter is identical with the historical object; it justifies its violent expulsion from the continuum of historical process (N10a,3).

  To view something objectively is to view it as an image, and for an image to be historical, it is necessary that we are able to see the dialectical from a position wholly external for it to truly be an objective image, requiring a different way of looking that deviates from the embedded point of view as an agent of history – or even from interpretive the point of view that narrative imposes upon us. Says Benjamin:

  …Just as form in art is distinguished by the fact that, opening up new contents, it develops new forms…It is only from without that a work of art has one and only one form (N9,2).

  Indeed, it is only from without that a historian may view the aspects of history as a monadological (singular, whole) image, requiring a suspension of movement even of our thought processes, which are, in his estimation, successive by their nature.

  3. The third principle is that the realization of dialectics is itself a monad. To attempt to grasp the streaming force of history is to grasp at lingering wisps of memory until the moment when the historical image is free from all temporal attachment. As the surge of history pushes though the historian’s net and what is caught is fragmented, torn from the temporal succession, it’s all a bit slippery. Early in his explanation of the dialectical image (in N2a,2, N2a,3, and throughout), Benjamin frames historicism as an awakening to the notion of memories and past events as art pieces, strange and separate from ourselves.

  In the dialectical image, what has been within a particular epoch is always, simultaneously, ‘what has been from time immemorial.’ As such, however, it is manifest, on each occasion, only to a quite specific epoch—namely, the one in which humanity, rubbing its eyes recognizes just this particular dream image as such. It is at this moment that the historian takes up, with regard to that image, the task of dream interpretation (N4,1).

  We see what has been “from time immemorial” as something distant and discontinuous. We reach to rescue the object of the dream, but it is strange and difficult to hold fast. The image is different from history as lived, and as such requires fairly radical interpretation to become an image.

  4. Thus we have the fourth tenet of the doctrine of historical materialism: the critique of progress and the utter violence of separating a historical moment from the transient flow of history. Though the historian may catch aspects of history in a sturdy scaffolding as it passes through on its ephemeral way, the monadological structure of history demands that:

  the object of history is to be blasted out of the continuum of historical succession (N10,3).

  The objects must be wrenched free from time, or else remain little more than wisps of loose, untethered connections. An isolated monad, in contrast, can be gripped wholly and examined objectively. But ironically, it is only this fixity that actually allows us to understand motion. It is only in the stillness of the image which negates the motion of progression that we are somehow better able to to understand the true definition of progress:

  In every true work of art there is a place where, for one who removes there, it blows cool like the wind of a coming dawn. From this it follows that art, which has often been considered refractory to every relation with progress, can provide its true definition… Progress has its seat not in the continuity of elapsing time but in its interferences—where the truly new makes itself felt for the first time, with the sobriety of dawn. (N9a,7).

  In breaking the dialectical motion of history for the sake of objective historicity, we are able to better see that dialectical motion of creation, of newness, and synthesis. Though motionless in and of itself, the historical image can only be delimited as such through breaking, blasting, and fragmenting; the true definition of progress is not to be found in progression as such, but instead in its breakdown.

  5. The final principle of the doctrine provides the other side of this equation. Quoth Benjamin: “Historical materialism bases its procedures on long experience, common sense, presence of mind, and dialectics” (N11,4). Basically, in order to draw the dialectical distinction between the objectified historical image and the transience of passing history, one must have long experience of that transience in order to understand its ephemeral nature as ungraspable when viewed as such. To break a fragment from the flow of history and objectify it as a monad, one must have a sense of what s/he is breaking the monad free from.

  —–

  This is a rough foundation of Benjamin’s view on history, but there’s a lot to play with here.

  Aesthetically speaking, the attempt to history negates the very history we are trying to see. What we can grasp is the image, which is whole in a monadological way, a fossilization of a presence that is no longer present, and which we view from the outside (as we view images in the most literal sense). But history as lived and experienced can only be viewed from within the experiencing itself. What then can an image of any kind tell us? As I said early on in this post, an image implies as much difference as it does resemblance; a photograph implies the absence of the moment it portrays as much as it recalls that moment to our minds.

  The problem of historicism is inescapable: to understand a piece of history, we must be outside the historical event, and to be outside of the historical event, we must be far enough removed from its ephemeral occurrence that it decays into an image, which is no longer the historical event itself, but a monadological ruin that encapsulates the presence of the moment by its negation of presence.

  This raises questions about the dangers of dialectics possibly depriving us of agency in the name of historical understanding. The dialectical image is not only a site for the clash of opposing tensions, as it is for Hegel, but is itself a non-progressive, non-continuous manifestation of the dialectic, drawing into sharp distinction with the transience of temporal history the lasting isolation of a fragment, ripped violently from the smoothness of temporal continuity such that it may be frozen for reflection and analysis posthumously. It seems that we’re given a choice: to act without historical understanding, as players within an ongoing, subjective, and thus unstudyable narrative, or step so far outside of an event so that we might see it, but not participate because all that it can be for us, from this view, is a bit of historical rubble.

  But then, I’ve always been drawn to ruins, far more than any well-preserved building. I prefer to see the rust and decay of an artifact than to see it restored to its former glory – and perhaps the same can be said of the images of history we catch as they crumble away: that in their broken isolation from narrative, there is far more indication of their progressive chronology than any clean narrative could ever portray.

  Next time in Philosopher Fridays, I’ll tackle what this violent dialectic of the historical image means for Benjamin’s understanding of stories, art, and experience. For another excellent meditation on the limits of historical perspective, check out this recent post by MJ Wright.

  ——————

  [1] Walter Benjamin. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002

  Posted in Series | 11 Comments | Tagged arcades project, benjamin, convolute N, dialectics, frankfurt school, historicity, history, images, longreads, philosopher fridays, philosophy, stories, walter benjamin

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