Gahlot 1

Vaishali Gahlot

15MENG012

MA (F) English

St. Stephen’s College

THE IDEA OF HISTORY IN THE ESSAYS OF WALTER BENJAMIN, HOMI K. BHABHA AND JULIA KRISTEVA

The works of literary theorists are informed by a sense of the past which pervades the present vision
of society. On the basis of the historical understanding, they try to project a vision of the future. The
past is, in a sense, over but in another sense, it is only available to us, knowable, as part of the
present. The past may be real but it is, by definition, irrevocable in its pastness. Walter Benjamin in
his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” discusses a shift in perception
and its affect in the wake of the advent of film and photography in the twentieth century. He writes
of the loss of aura of a work of art through the mechanical reproduction of a work of art. Homi K.
Bhabha in his essay “How Newness Enters the World” talks about the concepts of postmodern
space, postcolonial times and cultural translation from the perspective of marginality. In “Women’s
Time”, Julia Kristeva argues that in a modern society, human history attempts to regulate human
behaviour into a kind of religion, which implies a certain dogma that is limiting and oppressive. She
proposes a third wave of feminism to coincide with current feminist theory which will create its own
signifying space. This paper attempts to look at the idea of history in these three essays in the
background of a few major developments in historiography with time.

Aristotle relegated history to a less elevated position than poetry. This view was challenged in the
early modern period when rationalism and empiricism, championed by Francis Bacon, allotted
history a more serious epistemological status. Inductive reasoning based on observation by a
detached observer was the proper activity of the historian and scientist alike and would contribute
to humanity’s ever expanding knowledge of the world. Poetry was pleasing and popular but the
imagination was not a proper tool for the serious work of historical enquiry. The association of
history with empirical science was further consolidated through the Enlightenment, when the view
that human beings could rationally understand and explain more and more of their world was
combined with a sense that this would contribute to the progressive improvement of human society.
This progressive view of human society was further taken up by Hegel. Hegel viewed the events of
human history as part of the unfolding of a general idea, unwittingly fulfilling the demands of
Reason, the one true essence. Although many empiricists rejected this overarching explanation and
its metaphysical grounding, the idea of a progressive linear history is evident throughout the great
narrative histories of the nineteenth century, which ‘recorded’ and justified the imperial ambitions
of the European nation states. Hegel’s most famous successor in proposing that history is governed
by a particular force was, ironically, Karl Marx, whose political analysis offered a very different
interpretation of the events of the past and of the role of the historian.

Marx rejected the illusion of disinterested history and presented his own historical intervention as
part of an attempt to change the world. His theory of ‘historical materialism’ argued that social
existence determines consciousness and placed economics and the unequal, conflictual, class
relations produced by capitalism at the centre of the historical process. The past is to be examined
because it affects, even determines, the possibilities of the present. In addition to reading history as
struggle, Marx argued that cultural production, including the writing of history, was ideological,
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promoting the economic interests of the ruling classes by presenting them as natural and universal.
Marxism exposed the illusory nature and political interests served by the model of disinterested
history but offered an overarching explanatory theory of history that was later seen as too
restrictive.

History was relegated to the background in the theory of the New Critics. In the early twentieth
century influential schools of criticism associated with F.R. Leavis and with I.A. Richards, among
others, emphasised the value of studying literary texts apparently freed from the shackles of
historical context. In America, New Criticism explicitly divorced literary texts from their historical
moments of production and condemned contextual or historicist approaches as distractions or
‘fallacies’. Literary critics saw history as background and historical texts, of and on the past, as
sources of information. This assumption was challenged in the 1960s by the Marxist literary critic
Raymond Williams, whose redefinition of culture challenged the basis of traditional literary studies
and paved the way for a series of radical practices. For Williams culture was the whole way of life of
a society, not a collection of great works of art. His broader definition of culture contributed to the
impetus for the foundation of the discipline of Cultural Studies, while his insistence that culture is
dynamic and changing, reflecting but also acting upon society, transformed radical literary criticism.
While Marx saw history as structured by class struggle and culture as an ideological cover-up,
Williams read culture as the material of conflict and interplay between residual, dominant and
emergent tendencies. Literary texts, as both products and producers of the social, material
conditions of existence, played a powerful part in upholding and contesting social orders in this
historical dynamic. Another crucial perspective on history was offered by Benjamin. Walter
Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” explored historical materialism in ways which
disrupted any sense of guaranteed progression. Further, the work of Hayden White in 1970s called
‘the linguistic turn’ explored the textuality of history wherein he argued that historians do not find
the meaning of the past by examining the facts, they invent or make meanings through their use of
language.

As Michel de Certeau writes in his essay “Writings and History”, ways of conceptualising the
relations between past, present and future are themselves historically and culturally contingent. In
the perspective of the above developments, we try to locate the idea of history in the essays of
Benjamin, Bhabha and Kristeva.

“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” explores the world of mass produced
artworks, in particular those of photography and films. Benjamin blurred the boundaries of many
traditionally isolated subject areas. Marx’s critique of capitalism was done when the capitalistic
mode of production was in its nascent stage. He analysed the basic conditions underlying capitalism
and then predicted the future of a proletariat revolution that would be created by conditions of
capitalism itself. Benjamin says that it is only today that we can analyse if history has taken the
predicted course. Instead of predicting the course of arts in the future proletariat societies,
Benjamin wants to analyse the “developmental tendencies of art under present conditions of
production”. These tendencies are evident in the economy too, not just in the superstructure.
Theses about art proposed by Benjamin brush aside a number of outmoded concepts like creativity
and genius, eternal value and mystery. They are useful “for the formulation of revolutionary demand
in the politics of art”. Benjamin claims that what has disappeared in the age of mechanical
reproduction is the “aura” of the work of art. Historical circumstances determine the manner in
which the human sense perception is organised and the medium in which it is accomplished. The
adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope.
Although mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on
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ritual, the criterion of authenticity becomes politics. In the film industry, the cult of the movie star
brings with it the “spell of personality”, not the unique aura of the person. Mechanical reproduction
of art changes the reaction of the masses towards art, introducing a nostalgic hold onto the past.

Benjamin says that – “The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticised with
aversion”. While the painting invites the spectator to contemplation, the movie frame doesn’t allow
the spectator that space. The growing democratisation of arts doesn’t portend a utopian Marxist
future for Benjamin. On the other hand, for him, the revolutionary potential of the proletariat is
dissipated by giving them forms of expression which are ultimately contained within Fascism which
aestheticizes the political. Communism can respond by politicising art. He says- “The growing
proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the
same process. Fascism attempts to organise the newly created proletarian masses without affecting
the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these
masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves . . . Mankind, which in Homer’s
time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation
has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the
first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism
responds by politicising art”.

In “Women’s Time”, Kristeva explicitly addresses the question of feminism and its relation to
femininity, along with the symbolic order. History, according to her, is characterised as “linear time”:
time as project, teleology, departure, progression, and arrival. Female subjectivity is linked to both
‘cyclical’ time (progression) and the ‘monumental’ time (eternity). Kristeva argues that the first wave
of feminism which demanded equal rights with men were essentially demanding a place in the
‘linear’ time. The second wave of feminism emphasised women’s difference from men and
demanded their right to remain ‘outside’ the linear time of history and politics. This stance,
according to her, is flawed since it risks degeneration into an inverted form of sexism. The Second
World War brought along with it an end to the nation as a reality. It would be preserved only for
ideological or strictly political purposes, its social and philosophical coherence having been
collapsed. The hysteric, either male or female, who suffers from reminiscences would rather
recognise his or her self in the anterior temporal modalities: cyclical or monumental. Kristeva
critiques Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis. She rejects the linear progressive view of time and
history that readily accepts hypothesis proposed by theorists like Freud which propose a model of
cause-and-effect.

Kristeva argues- “Stated in still other terms, the reality of castration is no more real than the
hypothesis of an explosion which, according to modern astrophysics, is at the origin of the universe:
nothing proves it, in a sense it is an article of faith, the only difference being that numerous
phenomena of life in this ‘big-bang’ universe are explicable only through this initial hypothesis. She
warns against the dangers of extreme form of feminism that threatens to turn the opposite sex into
a scapegoat charged with evil, thereby making feminism another form of religion. Religion here
means the “phantasmic necessity on the part of speaking beings to provide themselves with a
representation (animal, female, male, parental, etc.) in place of what constitutes them as such, in
other words, symbolization- the double articulation and syntactic sequence of language, as well as
its preconditions or substitutes (thoughts, affects, etc.)”. Kristeva’s concept of history is therefore
more aligned with the cyclical view of time metaphorically connected with women’s reproductive
cycle.

In Bhabha’s writing there is a convergence of patterns of minority, migratory and diasporic existence
with that of the ambivalences of contemporary ‘high’ theory. He rejects the traditional Marxist Base-
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Superstructure model whereby cultural production is relegated to an after-effect of economic

activity. Bhabha challenges the notions of fixed identity, the undermining of binary oppositions, and
an emphasis on language and discourse- together with the power relations in which these are
imbricated- as underlying our understanding of cultural phenomena. The notion of “hybridity” is
central to Bhabha’s work in challenging notions of identity, culture, and nation as coherent and
unified entities that exhibit a linear historical development. Hybridity expresses a state of “in
betweenness” as in a person who stands between two cultures. For him, Althusser, Lacan and
Foucault opened up other possibilities of understanding history, the relations of production, and the
ambivalent structure of subjectivity. The notion of cultural difference foregrounds the ambivalence
of even Western cultural authority in own moment of enunciation. This notion of difference
problematizes the binary division of past and present, tradition and modernity. Cultures are never
unitary in themselves nor simply dualistic in the relation of the Self to the Other. The pact of
interpretation is never just an act of communication between two interlocuters; these two ‘places’
must pass through a ‘Third Space’ which represents both the general conditions of language and the
specific implication of the utterance. This third space is unrepresentable in itself but makes meaning
and reference an ambivalent process. This space can make us elude the politics of polarity and
emerge as the other of our selves.

Bhabha, too, rejects the progressivist notion of history in his essay “How Newness enters the Wold”.
He argues that- “The newness of migrant or minority discourse that has to be discovered in media
res: a newness that is not part of the ‘progressivist’ division between past and present, or the archaic
and the modern; nor is it a ‘newness’ that can be contained in the mimesis of ‘original and copy’”.
Further, he writes that- “The present of the world, that appears through the breakdown of
temporality, signifies a historical intermediacy, familiar to the psychoanalytic concept of
Nachtraglichkeit (deferred action): ‘a transferable function, whereby the past dissolves in the
present, so that the future becomes (once again) an open question, instead of being specified by the
fixity of the past”. What Bhabha is essentially arguing for is the important liminal zone that the
postcolonial immigrant occupies. He argues that the category of the Postmodern assumes a neat
categorisation of subject positions, which leaves no room for subjects to exist in the liminal space.
He critiques Jameson’s Postmodernism Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by saying that for
Jameson, the possibility of becoming historical demands a containment of the disjunctive social
time. For Bhabha, the minority subject position of belonging to a community punctures the larger
Marxist narrative of class-consciousness, thereby undermining Marx’s view of history.
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References

Reading the Past (ed. Tamsin Spargo) – page 1-11

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

Bhabha, Homi K. “How Newness Enters the World”

Kristeva, Julia. “Women’s Time”