This never ending cycle is based on promises of progress that can only create catastrophic history. Each day, our dreams of change and meaning push us towards an impossible future – hoping, somehow, that we may grab the mirage and smooth over the destructions of the past

Of Benjamin’s various metaphors for understanding history, that of the angel runs parallel to his reference of the saying that the historian is “a prophet facing backwards.” The two different readings of this saying parallel, in turn, his distinction between his concept of history and the conformist one. He says that one way to read the saying is as a description of the position taken by the historian of empathy who is marked by despair and accedia, doomed to drown in his conformism to the tides of history. A very different reading of the saying could describe well the posture of the historian who, like the Angel of History, turns his back to the future in order to set his sight on the past. He does this in order to take hold of the true picture of the past that appears momentarily and without warning in a moment of danger. For in another parallel metaphor Benjamin describes “an occurrence of ball lightning that runs across the whole horizon of the past,” illuminating moments that had been up until that point left dark and mysterious. From the juxtaposition of these metaphors we can gather that while on the one hand progress may be a storm always blowing the angel away from a broken world that he [they] faces, frustrating [their] his desire to stop and make it whole, nevertheless this same storm produces the very flashes of light in which a moment of history unexpectedly “present[s] itself… as a moment of humanity.” He continues: “In this moment, time must be brought to a standstill.”¶ It is this standstill, jetztzeit, which may also be translated as now-time, that is at the heart of the theses. In the sixteenth he writes that the true historian “cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time takes a stand and has come to a standstill. For this notion defines the very present in which he himself is writing history.”¶ For Benjamin, the concept of a causal chain of progress is a smoothing-over, or reduction to a common denominator, of what is in truth an eternal catastrophe. He points out that “the basic concept in myth is the world as punishment.” This ancient concept has taken on a more terrible modern form in “the eternity of punishment in hell,” which “substitutes an eternity of torment for the eternity of a cycle.” It is worth noting, however, that Benjamin does not straightforwardly claim that hell is the reality of living in modern times. Rather, he describes hellish punishment as akin to the way in which a student is held after school, not allowed to run outside and play, forced to repeat the Sisyphean task of writing lines by hand repeatedly, e.g. I will not expose the ignorance of the faculty. It is no mistake that Benjamin would depict hell as so reminiscent of the conformist historian’s domain.¶ We might link Benjamin’s denial of progress with our own by pointing out that progress is nothing but a daily catastrophe of life in the world of the commodity. We can see this catastrophe around us everywhere: the architecture of the cities, the physical infrastructure of the multi-form prison, the endless apparatuses which exist to extract our energy to turn it into dead labor, the monotonous agricultural killing-fields, the ever-expanding ecological dead-zones. All processes that have dominated, extracted, and paved over generations of the living. Civilization’s homogenizing process is constantly intensifying and accelerating. Technological advances and other progressive developments are perpetually revolutionizing the armed disaster which confronts us as the future.¶ It is clear that Benjamin’s view is similar when he describes history and culture as the spoils carried by the rulers as they triumphantly proceed, tramping upon the prostrate bodies of the oppressed. “A historical materialist,” writes Benjamin, can only view these spoils “with cautious detachment. For in every case these treasures have a lineage which he cannot contemplate without horror…. The historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from this process of transmission as far as possible.”¶ Like Benjamin and the angel, we would like to pause for a moment so fair, awaken the dead and piece together what has been smashed. But what blows us away from being able to do this is progress itself. It is as if the very passage of time, or more accurately the manner of its passage, has caught us up and distances us from the present moment itself. Indeed, if there is only ever one time, then there is also a manner or concept of time’s movement—progress—capable of blowing us away from being present in it.