[Xmca-l] Re: How Benjamin saw the angel in klee

[mike cole]

Very interesting history, Larry. Thanks a lot.
I encountered Benjamin's passage while teaching long before I saw the Klee
painting. The passage immediately resonated with me. For one thing, it
corresponded to the notion of the retrospective construction of meaning,
for another it corresponded to each of the following two thinkers whose
work I came upon in the course of my education while teaching in a comm
department.

Kierkegaard: "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived
forwards."



E.G. Boring, early/mid-20th century American psychologist on

this topic, which Boring conducted research on:



To be aware of a conscious datum is to be sure that it has passed. The

nearest actual approach to immediate introspection is early retrospection.

The experience described, if there be any such, is always just past; the

description is present. However, if I ask myself how I know the
description is present, I find myself describing the processes that
made up the description; the original describing is past.

. . Experience itself is at the end of the introspective rainbow. The

rainbow may have an end and the end may be somewhere; yet I seem never to

get to it. (Boring, 1933/1963, p. 228).

Note the implications of these ideas if you believe as I do that joint,
mediated, activity is at the core of human psychological functioning. Some
of these implications can be found in a paper called "remembering the
future"
http://lchc.ucsd.edu/People/MCole/Cole_Remembering%20the%20Future0001.pdf

mike

mike

On Mon, Nov 9, 2015 at 7:09 AM, Lplarry <lpscholar2@gmail.com> wrote:

> Mike,
> The question you posed, how Benjamin saw the truth of historical
> consciousness through klee's *image* opens a topic, a subject matter, and a
> question of method.
> Method for vasilyuk explores the salience of *response* and *address*.
> So klee's angel generated a coexperiencing response within benjamin's
> awareness that oriented Benjamin to a particular *tradition* which put into
> question "historical materialism".
> The quotation marks indicate historical materialism AS INTERPRETED
> normatively in 1939.
> Klee's angel ( or should we say benjamin's angel emerged while Benjamin
> was composing his thesis on history. The angel was thesis 12.
> The thesis were generated from the conflict generated when Hitler and
> stalin made a pact.
> This crisis shattered benjamin's trust in historical materialism as an
> approach, and threw Benjamin back (or return to) benjamin's earlier
> orientation to the mystery of metaphysics (and silence).
>
> Klees' image (now benjamin's image was coexperienced by Hannah ardent when
> Benjamin sent her the thesis. Hannah orients to the natality and birth of
> meaning and Hannah sent her experience of the angel to adorno who was
> deeply moved by klee and Benjamin and ardent's iimage of the angel.
> Adorno wrote a book, it was translated into English and this angel entered
> the culture and was carried to Wikipedia. Huw coexperienced this angel and
> shared it on XMCA. Mike questioned the genesis of benjamin's generative
> image and I am tracing its lineage through traditions OF justification.
> If this is a type of reflection and logic, and reason then this approach
> has a RELIANCE within topics, subject matters, and methods AS traditions.
>
> This tradition leads back to Vico and this breath of history is blowing
> the angel of history through the spaces and situations here and now as I
> com/pose this RESPONSE (with reliance being within a tradition which
> includes STILLNESS and SILENCE).
> Larry




-- 

It is the dilemma of psychology to deal as a natural science with an
object that creates history. Ernst Boesch