Walter Benjamin's proto-postmodernism

It would be an exaggeration to say that Walter Benjamin was, strictly speaking, a postmodernist.  But there are many tendencies of postmodernism in his writing, and the seeds of other tendencies that would be more fully developed by other writers.  

First and foremost: in the Preface to "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," he calls "creativity" an "outmoded concept".  Clearly, this is a postmodern, or anti-modern perspective, reminiscent of Mussolini's declaration that humanity has grown tired of liberty, because striving for creativity is central to the modernist project, and giving up on the very idea of creativity in a provocative pose of trollish world-weariness is the only thing that postmodernism has ever accomplished.  Benjamin may partially disavow or distance himself from the declaration that creativity is outmoded by saying that not he, but "they brush aside outmoded concepts such as creativity and genius" - "they" here presumably signifying the bourgeoisie, though there is no clear antecedent to this pronoun.  And of course Benjamin purports to oppose the bourgeoisie.  So, unlike your typical anti-modern reactionary, who whines about how ugly modern art is and longs for tradition, Benjamin is trying here to truly be post-modern.  But Benjamin is wrong.  The bourgeoisie never brushed aside creativity or claimed that creativity is outmoded.  On the contrary, the entire history of the bourgeois mode of production is a history of ceaseless, relentless, accelerating innovation in brazen defiance against all those who moan that creativity is either impossible or undesirable.  And we must insist, again and again, with furious ferocity, that Marx himself did not display this kind of miserable, worldweary entropy of the will that says that creativity is outmoded: it was he who declared that the revolution must take its poetry not from the past but only from the future.  

You can see Benjamin's postmodernist tendency in Theses on the Philosophy of History, as well, for instance in the famous passage about Klee's Angelus Novus:

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. 

Postmodernism could indeed be summarized as the pose of the angel (in Benjamin's imagination, not in Klee's original painting): turning one's back on the future.  Benjamin's attempt to theologize history is reminiscent of Carl Schmitt's and Erik Voegelin's.  In all cases, they are irrelevant.

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