Politics of History: Narrativity, Ideology, and Walter Benjamin's Critique of Progress

Abstract

This paper departs from the curious proliferation of alternative after the and turns in the humanities and social sciences. I contend that while social and cultural histories claim to have dismantled narratives of modernity, their employment of narrative forms of expression partakes in the politics of representation they repudiate in grand narratives. I present an attempt to triangulate this conundrum by placing into dialogue Walter Benjamin's critique of historicism and Hayden White's analysis of narrativity. I argue that the radical edge of Benjamin’s historical materialist method recasts historicism as a fundamental form of expression that corresponds to a “mythic” state of politics characterized by the persistence of the “ever-same” of relations of domination under the guise of the “ever-new” of progress and liberation. I conclude by suggesting that Benjamin's method of exposition in the Arcades Project, which builds historical constructs out of images rather than stories, provides a model for imagining history in a non-narrative register.