Happy Birthday Walter Benjamin!

Modest methodological proposal for the cultural-historical dialectic. It is very easy to establish oppositions, according to determinate points of view, within the various ‘fields’ of any epoch, such that on one side lies the lies the ‘productive,’ ‘forward looking,’ lively,’ ‘positive’ part of the epoch, and on the other side the abortive, retrograde, and obsolescent. The very contours of the positive element will appear distinctly only insofar as this element is set off against the negative. On the other hand, every negation has its value solely as background for the delineation of the lively, the positive. It is therefore of decisive importance that a new partitionIt is therefore of decisive importance that a new partition be applied to this initially excluded, negative component so that, by a displacement of the angle of vision (but not of the criteria!), a positive element emerges anew in it too - something different from that previously signified. And so on, ad infinitum, until the , until the entire past is brought into the present in a historical apocatastasis.

from Convolute N “Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress” Arcades Project