"Origin is the goal." Karl Kraus, Worte in Versen, Vol. 1 History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now. [Jetztzeit].* Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome incarnate. It evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past. Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is a tiger’s leap into the past. This jump, however, takes place in an arena where the ruling class give the commands. The same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical one, which is how Marx understood the revolution. Theses on the Philosophy of History. Walter Benajmin, 1939 Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Karl Marx 1852 If you die in the matrix you die in real life... |
The technological imagination from the early Romanticism through the historical Avant-Gardes to the Classical Space Age and beyond