now

"There is a picture by Klee called 'Angelus Novus.' An angel is presented in it who looks as if he were about to move away from something at which he is staring. His eyes are wide open, mouth agape, wings spread. The angel of history must look like that. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears to us, he sees one single catastrophe which relentlessly piles wreckage upon wreckage, and hurls them before his feet. '[. . .] The storm [from Paradise] drives him irresistibly into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. That which we call progress is this storm.' A construction of history that looks backward, rather than forward, at the destruction of material nature as it has actually taken place, provides dialectical contrast to the futurist myth of historical progress (which can only be sustained by forgetting what has happened)."
(Susan Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing; beginning with her translation of Benjamin's 'Uber den Begriff der Geschichte')

Question: How productive is his approach to history as a way of understanding the present day?
"I think it's terribly important[...] and I think this is something where conceptualisation comes closest to Freud because, in Benjamin, there is this notion which in Freud is 'deferred action'. In Benjamin, the notion is that the past picks on its meaning in the light of the present and that means that there is no absolute truth about the past and that the past's true, real truth comes out only over time through the development of its potentialities and also his sense that the past can run away from us - that we can lose the past and if we do our understanding of the present is going to be totally inadequate. I think that he's absolutely right there. It frightens me the historical amnesia that occurs and it is the other side of fashion; fashion as the temporality of modernity means that you throw away last year's experience and last year's fashions.
[...] there is no easy answer to that because what happens is you comb history and indeed you brush it against the grain and then certain aspects of it come out to you in the present as somehow meaningful - meaningful because of the present and not known before. There has to be this kind of flash of illumination, this flash of new understanding, and it can work except... again it's a dangerous kind of thing because as soon as you say something like that people will think you re-write the past in the light of the present. - well, that's true. Stalin did that and Fascism did that in a way that he doesn't mean at all. For him history being the history of the conquerors is always in collusion with power; the way it's passed down to us (the way culture is passed down to us) and therefore you have to brush it against the grain to get any kind of critical power out of it and to redeem the suffering of millions of people which has been the other face of historical progress."
(Susan Buck-Morss, interview)

"Benjamin's late [1940] text, 'Uber den Begriff der Geschichte' (known as the 'Theses on the Philosophy of History'), argues that the equation of technological with historical progress had led the German working class to set the wrong political goals:
It regarded technological development as the direction of those waters through which it thought itself to be moving. From there it was but a step to the illusion that factory work, which was a characteristic of technical progress, was itself a political accomplishment... (bypassing) the question of how... (the factory's) products were to benefit the workers while still not being at their disposal. It acknowledges only progress in the mastery of nature, not the retrogression of society.
Originally, the idea of progress was the standard by which the Enlightenment thinkers judged history and found it lacking. It is only when 'progress becomes the signature of the course of history in its totality' that this concept is identified with 'uncritical assumptions of actuality rather than with a critical position of questioning'. Benjamin searches out the origins of this mistaken identity."
(Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing)

"In a superb essay entitled 'Zeit zur Darstellung. Walter Benjamin's Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit' (Modern Language Notes, German Issue 107 (3) (1992)), Eva Geulen, after having attempted to determine the epistemological point of view from which Benjamin writes the essay in question as that of a yet undecided future in whose perspective the present appears as past, accounts for the double nature of the loss of the aura which so many interpreters have pointed at on the basis of what she analyses as the simultaneity of method and object, that is, in terms of the performative dimension of Benjamin's criticism. She writes: 'The theory of aura is the attempt to describe history not only in practical terms, but theoretically as well from a position for which no factual ground exists as yet. In other words, the concept of aura must mark out and localize itself in the essay itself. Aura belongs to the vocabulary of a possible, futural historiography. As anticipation of the future, the aura achieves intervention in history, stating, in this manner, what is now. That the specificity of traditional art consisted of its aura, can show itself only, when, and in so far as it has lost this character. The perception of aura arises from its loss.'"
(Gasché, Objective Diversions)

"One of the key issues that arises from Benjamin's work and it's one that I have addressed because I believe it to be absolutely essential is the thinking of the present. [...] This becomes very interesting because if one translates this into a certain metaphorics one would argue the following: that for Benjamin the mistake would be to believe that things were digital, ie. that if you have something digital and you blow it up nothing more is revealed; you simply get a larger version of the same thing. It's only by having something analogical, and here the perfect example would be the photograph and the film 'Blow Up' which, when as it was blown up, something was revealed which had it been a digital photograph would have been impossible. In other words, that if one takes the analogical and the digital as a type of metaphor, providing a metaphorics within which to talk about the relationship between surface and depth, the point for Benjamin would be that to think that the world was a surface, to think that things could be digital would be to misconstrue the nature of what there is. It's only by recognising that there is a depth - and a depth in the precise sense of what generates the surface, what generates what there is not seen, is not at hand, that it then becomes possible to understand the present."
(Andrew Benjamin, interview)

The idea is not to replace the essay but to rework it, use it, translate it. For instance, according to Benjamin, history is a process of 'storytelling' that 'bears witness on the present'. He says, in 'Theses on the Philosophy of History' that 'History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now (Jetztzeit)'.
He sees this approach as crucial in contesting the 'false continuum of history' that does not sufficiently recognise the conditions of its own production in the present. He affirms that, 'A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop.'

"...And yet on the other hand, there is a tremendously conservative aspect of his research. ...he seldom read a book published in his own century and most of his texts were very obscure 19th century texts; things that are difficult to find at any place except at a great research library like the Bibliothèque Nationale and it seems to me that that retrieval of the past, that antiquarian, collector's mentality is as important as this trust in modern technology and it's putting those two things together that I think is necessary."
(Susan Buck-Morss, interview)

Benjamin's allegorical figure of 'the angel of history' looks at nothing but the expanse of 'ruins' of the past, whilst being 'blown backwards into the future by the storm of progress'. As much as history, the idea of progress is an important one for Benjamin, claiming that 'We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight... One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm.' This is another way of distracting from the fact that technological change operates with a social system of predominant ideas and values. But these are not fixed and might be altered.
In the present context of social and technological change, how do we address questions over the past and future?