The Tiger's Leap and the Dog's Paw: Method, Matter, and Meaning in the History of the Book

Since the turn to theory, no critic for literary scholars has resonated and endured with as much power as Walter Benjamin. His appeal is equal parts biography and thought: the urban flaneur and modernist translator; the period-hopping intellectual, as comfortable with seventeenth-century baroque drama as with twentieth-century Marxian dialectics; the journalist beyond academe, struggling with Frankfurt University over his (rejected) habilitation thesis, before writing gnomic reportage suffused with learned allusion; the independent scholar, who never finished his magnum opus; the world-historical entrapment, with its persecution, escape, and tragic end as he fled the Nazis in 1940 and killed himself in the Pyrenees. The romance of Benjamin—for certainly these anti-institutional roles appeal to higher-ed drones in the twenty-first century academy—is transmitted as well through a prose oeuvre that, while deserving a career of deep engagement, is perhaps best read for its aphoristic lyricism, rich with implication.

In "Theses on the Philosophy of History"—one of his last works, written in 1940 before the fateful trip from Paris to the Spanish border—Benjamin posited a historical method that unsettled the categories of both "past" and "present" typical of traditional historiography.¹ If history is the writing of the relations of these categories, Benjamin questioned how we summon up the past and what that knowledge means in the present. Resisting a positivist orientation that would capture the past "as things really were" and a developmental orientation that would capture the past as it exists on a continuum with the present, Benjamin instead proposed an alternate temporality when doing history, one not as naïve as the positivist nor as progress bound as the developmentalist.

Landmark restoration might be a way to illustrate these orientations and time schemes. The Thaddeus Kosciuszko house in Philadelphia features tourist signage that explains its rebuilding. On the sign, a photograph from 1975 shows the ruined house, with a caption and arrow indicating the "original historic brickwork at corner." In the same photo, another caption laments later additions, and, with arrow, directs viewers to the supposed eyesores and to the steps taken: "remove non-historic brickwork and restore original brick pattern." Such a desire for "historic" brickwork reflects both of the temporalities of traditional historical method. In its quest, it offers an authentic past based on original construction material as it really was, and, in its practice, it creates a homogenizing parade of history, from past to present. In fact, it creates this latter developmental temporality—a seamless recognition of antecedents, a Whiggish, high-fiving confirmation as we moderns look back—by slighting, dismissing, or repressing the later bricks as "non-historic."

Benjamin reframed the discussion by offering a method shot through with messianism. This method would abandon the pastness of the past implicit in positivism while exploding the continuum of history presented by the developmentalists. In Benjamin's time zone, the historian would, in a fair bit of bombast, redeem the past for the present. His take on the relations of past and present was not solely an echo of Vico's tropology nor of Croce's dictum that "all history is contemporary history"—prepostmodernists who understood the mediating influence of the present on the past. In redeeming the past for the present, Benjamin called the homogeneity of traditional history "empty time" and contrasted it with what he called "now-time." "Empty time" is that narrative temporality we default to when writing up a story of the past as one of continuity and change, where we amass data and look for cause-and-effect. "Now-time" is a collage temporality, where the past clutters the present. The past's traces and crystallizations sunder the developmental logic of history writing, arrest the present moment with a constellation of...