BENJAMIN: RUINS, HISTORY AND PROGRESS

This blog, silently accompanies a research project that has in the poetic, rhetorical and theoretical figure of ruin one of its main instruments of reflection, Ruin as a metaphor of spatial processes, historical dynamics, ruin has been rescued by multiple Classical authors as contemporaries as a powerful metaphor for space thinking, which has sparked interesting contemporary discussions about the utility, wealth and heuristic power of the figure of the Ruin, we hope to pick up some of those discussions later, notwithstanding this blog Bet on the Ruin, in fact it is present from its title, its aesthetic proposal and also theoretical.

Source:https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/walter-benjamin-messianism-revolution-theses-history/ 

I affirm that theoretical relevance of Ruin as a figure is based on its multiplicity. For express this, I take a classical quotation from Walter Benjamin, one of the classic authors in the use of the Ruin to think critically about modernity. In his famous Theses on History, Benjamin comments on a picture and a poem, in what is called Thesis IX:

“My wing is ready for flight,

I would like to turn back.

If I stayed everliving time,

I'd still have little luck.

—Gerhard Scholem, "Greetings from the Angelus"

“There is a picture by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows ward the sky. What we call progress is this storm” (Benjamin, 2006 [1940]:392)

In this brief aphorism we can rescue a series of interesting elements, Benjamin makes this comment from a pair of artistic elements, on the one hand, a poem by Gerhard Scholem entitled "Gruss for Angelus", on the other, a painting painted in Watercolor by the Swiss painter Paul Klee that Benjamin would acquire. From both artistic references of aesthetics and poetry, they unleash a series of reflections intensely chained in a fragment in which artistic inspiration forms a deep criticism of the idea of ​​modern progress. In this critique, destruction appears as a historical regularity, the Angel of History looking at the past, interprets the course of history as an accumulation of destruction, ruins and debris, Western history and the state of modernity Can´t be thought in abstraction from the destruction produced by it, modernity and progress are interpreted as a storm unleashed from paradise.

The Ruin is a powerful metaphor for thinking and rethinking space and history, the Ruin is a multiple figure in the rhetoric, poetic, aesthetic as well as theoretical and philosophical dimensions, its use opens encounter bridges for social sciences, Humanities and art, and in this way it constitutes a hybrid category that crosses disciplines and sensibilities. Ruin not only allows us to rethink progress and modernity, but also the logics of capital production and its incessant dialectic of destruction and creation. The Ruin allows us to interweave art, philosophy, memory, materiality, time, beauty and violence.

The historian Ann Stoler (2013) has proposed a turn in the approaches of ruin, transiting from the ruins as objects to the ruination as dynamic processes. We followed the dialectical point of view of George Lukacs (1971) when he stated that things must to be shown as aspects of processes, in the same way, ruins are not things in the present but relations between men, things, materials, politics and economics in history and space.

Through the ruin we can read the strong and fragility of  capitalism, the state, the culture and the nature. That’s what we tried in this blog with the desert ruins of oblivion.

REFERENCES

- Benjamin, Walter. 2006. “On the Concept of History”. In: Eliand, H and Jenning, M (eds). Walter Benjamin Selected Writings Vol. 4 1938-1940. Pp. 389-411.

-Lukacs, George. 1971. “History and Class Consciousness”. Cambridge: MIT Press.

-Stoler, Ann. 2013. "Introduction". In: Stoler, A (Ed). Imperial Debris: on ruins and ruination, Durham: Duke University Press.Pp. 1-37