“To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was.”… It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”

Benjamin’s materialist historiography suggests that even recollecting events as they actually occurred (memory) can emplot alternative courses of history. The Dialectics of Memory, aka the Dialectical Image: a constant movement between memory constituted by the authenticity that derives from the witnesses’ caacity to tell what actually happened and memory cast into the future, a ‘this could be again’. The former establishes historical truthfullness, the latter process transforms what is remembered into that which should be anticipated.

“While the call “never again” gains its force by seeing the past as a possible future, this memory work makes it possible to imagine multiple possibilities in the past. By interupting the linear sequence of conventional historical narratives, Matsuda’s remembrance generates a space in which counterfactual histories can be told… As powerful prophecies that are at the same time scrupulously empirical , the survivors testimonies produce knowledge that is splendidly mesmerizing, spectacularly extraordinary, and filled with precious wisdom “for future use,” in a way that reminds us of fables.”

-Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory

“If the past does not bind social consciousness and the future begins here, the present is the “historical” moment, the permanent yet shifting point of crisis and the time for choice.”

Ahis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy

“The concept of progress should be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things “just keep on going”is the catastrophe. Not something that is impending at any particular time ahead, but something that is always given… Hell is not something that lies ahead of us, but this very life, here and now.”

Walter Benjamin, “N: [Re the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress]” in the Arcades Project.

Benjamin’s history is very teleological- the Arcades Project, Berlin 1900, and One Way Street are all about how the past is simply stepping stones to the present. While his conceptualization of history is teleological, his historical method is not. Benjamin wants to return to the past and reconstruct the pieces in order to show what the present could have been. This is especially true in One Way Street- the title itself a reference to the function of time as being uni-directional. In this way, Benjamin does not reflect a technological determinism, as many people claim he does; but, rather, he shows the technological utopianism that could have been had society been mature enough to handle the technology it was handed. The technology is the Adamic language which we lost in the fall from Paradise.

“The cityspace is an object that reflects and mediates infrastructural conditions–urban development projects can change its landscape. At the same time, the reformulated cityspace may in turn provide a new “container of power,” leading to new knowledge and consciousness, as well as amnesia, about history and society.”

-Lisa Yoneyama, Introduction from Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory

“What science has “established,” memoration can modify. memoration can make the incomplete (happiness) into something complete, and the complete (suffering) into something incomplete. That is theology; but in memoration we discover the expereience (Erfahrung) that forbids us to conceive of history as thoroughly a0theological, even though we barely dare not attempt to write it according to literally theological concepts.”

-Walter Benjamin, “N: [Re the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress]” in the Arcades Project.

“The space protects the weapons of the weak against the reality of the established order. It also hides them from the social categories which “make history” because they dominate it. And whereas historiography recounts in the past tense the strategies of instituted powers, these “fabulous” stories offer their audience a repertory of tactics for future use.”

-Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

“People are shown not what they were, but what they must remember having been. Since memory is actually a very important factor in struggle… if one controls people’s memory, one controls their dynamism. And one also controls their experience, their knowledge of previous struggles.”

-Michel Foucault, “Film and Popular Memory”.