Hostile History

I confess I'm feeling a little hostile towards Walter Benjamin and historical materialism.  I'm working through it though.  I do appreciate his contribution to discussions beyond the "this, then that" narratives of history, but he gets referenced so bloody often and it all feels so...overwrought and indulgently righteous at the moment.   Like I said, I'm working through it.

From Wikipedia:

"Walter Benjamin was a German-Jewish intellectual, who functioned variously as a literary critic, philosopher, sociologist, translator, radio broadcaster and essayist. His work, combining elements of historical materialism, German idealism and Jewish mysticism, has made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory and Western Marxism, and has sometimes been associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory."

"Theses on the Philosophy in History is an essay by Walter Benjamin."

"In the essay, Benjamin presents a critique of what he calls 'historicism,' a notion of history that conceives of the past as a sequence or “causal nexus” of events that are fixed, and which give rise mechanically to the present and future. According to this concept of history, the work of the historian is simply to explain “the way it really was,” by uncovering and arranging historical events in their proper order of appearance, retelling the past as a lifeless series of moments that follow each other 'like the beads of a rosary.'"

"Historical materialism is a methodological approach to the study of society, economics, and history, first articulated by Karl Marx (1818-1883) as "the materialist conception of history". Historical materialism looks for the causes of developments and changes in human society in the means by which humans collectively produce the necessities of life. The non-economic features of a society (e.g. social classes, political structures, ideologies) are seen as being an outgrowth of its economic activity. Since Marx's time, the theory has been modified and expanded by thousands of Marxist thinkers. It now has many variants."

"Historical materialism can be seen to rest on the following principles:

• 1. The basis of human society is how humans work on nature to produce the means of subsistence.

• 2. There is a division of labour into social classes (relations of production) based on property ownership where some people live from the labour of others.

• 3. The system of class division is dependent on the mode of production.

• 4. The mode of production is based on the level of the productive forces.

• 5. Society moves from stage to stage when the dominant class is displaced by a new emerging class, by overthrowing the "political shell" that enforces the old relations of production no longer corresponding to the new productive forces. This takes place in the superstructure of society, the political arena in the form of revolution, whereby the underclass "liberates" the productive forces with new relations of production, and social relations, corresponding to it."

"Historicism is a mode of thinking that assigns a central and basic significance to a specific context, such as historical period, geographical place and local culture. As such it is in contrast to individualist theories of knowledges such as empiricism and rationalism, which neglects the role of traditions. Historicism therefore tends to be hermeneutical, because it places great importance on cautious, rigorous and contextualized interpretation of information and/or relativist, because it rejects notions of universal, fundamental and immutable interpretations."

"Historicism may be contrasted with reductionist theories, which suppose that all developments can be explained by fundamental principles (such as in economic determinism), or theories that posit historical changes as result of random chance."

Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Benjamin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Concept_of_History_/_Theses_on_the_Philosophy_of_History
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicism