Walter Benjamin and the Mexican Revolution

8/13/2019 Walter Benjamin and the Mexican Revolution

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Walter Benjamin and the Mexican Revolution: A Meditation on

the Theses on the Philosophy of History and Diego Riveras

Murals

Horacio Legrs

Discourse, Volume 32, Number 1, Winter 2010, pp. 66-86 (Article)

Published by Wayne State University Press

For additional information about this article

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Discourse, 32.1, Winter 2010, pp. 6686.Copyright 2010 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309. ISSN 1522-5321.

Walter Benjamin and the

Mexican Revolution

A Meditation on the Theses on the Philosophy

of History and Diego Riveras Murals

Horacio Legrs

I want to start by acknowledging a possible objection. The namesWalter Benjamin and Mexican Revolution (or Diego Rivera,for that matter) dont seem to belong together. Latin AmericaorMexicodoesnt seem to occupy a significant space in the work ofBenjamin. We should not hold this lack of interest on Latin Amer-ica against Benjamin. He was keenly aware of the geopolitical limitsof his own thinking and insisted, more than once, that his prop-ositions were limited to a spiritual entity called Europe. As for

the expression Mexican Revolution, it is not without problemsof its own. The revolutionary nature of the Mexican Revolutionhas been contested by Latin Americanists themselves.1So, as if thename Benjamin were not extraneous enough to Mexican history,we are confronted with the additional problem of validating Mex-icos revolutionary credentials if the title is going to be credible.The same effort of authenticationit is interesting to noteis notrequired in the case of Walter Benjamin. If Benjamin doesnt needcredentials to think the revolution, it is not because the revolution

is thought to be an eminently European issue, but rather becausethe business of thinking itself has been for a long time a purely


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Walter Benjamin and the Mexican Revolution 67

European territory. As Dipesh Chakrabarty put it, for modernthought, only Europe is a theoretical object, whereas the peripheryis subject only to empirical knowledge.2One of the few areas in

which this epistemological division of labor has been reversed is inthe case of revolutionsespecially in the 1960s and 1970s when theThird World in general and Latin America in particular emergedas a properly revolutionary location.

Another doubt may arise from my use of a painter and a phi-losopher to approach the question of revolution, an approach thatseems to go against the grain of the intellectual division of labor thatI have just criticized. Against this prejudice, it would be necessary tostate that divisions such as empirical and theoretical or praxis and

thinking are of little avail in dealing with revolutions. A revolution isalso, and prominently, a time of invention and improvisation. Para-phrasing the first romantics, we can say that the thinker willing tothink the event of revolution must have the same spiritual poweras the poet. When it comes to revolutions, the real question is notso much how an artistic activity can provide an account of this phe-nomenon, but rather how a positive discourse of the social can illu-minate a realm that had been for centuries the constitutive outsideof any positive rendering of politics and society.

This epistemologically eccentric nature of revolution hasdefinitive effects on the way Benjamin arranged his text Theseson the Philosophy of History. We know that the final confronta-tion of the Theses is with historicism:the doctrine that sees historymoving in the direction of the arrow of time under a constant con-solidation of old achievements and the prosecution of new goals.Historicism is to history what developmentalism is to politics: abelief in a continuous, increasing, and benefic progress of human-ity. Since this is precisely the assumption that Benjamin wants to

question, he cannot conduct his quarrel with historicism in thelinear style proper to historicism itself. Instead, Benjamin unpackshis argument around a series of discontinuous questions: What isthe relationship between history and politics? Why is the histori-cal perception of historicism false? What is the perspective on his-tory proper of materialism? Is this perspective still material in anytraditional sense? The cost of avoiding the path of linear exposi-tion is a multiplication of the proverbial intricacies of Benjaminsstyle. Moreover, Benjamin does not only indicate the difficulties

at stake, but performs them in his very text. As we will see later inthis essay, none of these problems is alien to the artistic practice ofDiego Rivera, whose murals confront the same problematic inter-section of history and revolution that also occupies Benjamin inthe Theses.


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68 Horacio Legrs

Benjamins Theses on the Philosophy of History

Benjamin did not intend the Theses to be publishedat least

not in his lifetime. He feared it would elicit a form of enthusias-tic misunderstanding.3He was granted this wish. The text wouldhave to be reconstructed on the basis of copies that circulatedthrough Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno. As for the pub-lication, Adorno produced a small edition of the theses in theUnited States in 1942. Five years later, Les Temps Modernspublisheda French translation (but not the one prepared by Benjamin him-self), and Adorno republished the text in 1950. But it was not untilthe Theses appeared as part of Benjamins collected works that

they started drawing the attention of a wider audience.4

As Benjamin foresaw, the Theses are many things for manyreaders. In my case, I stress the question of the mutual implicationof history and revolution. By mutual implication,I mean the extentto which our notion of the historical has revolution as its concep-tual correlate. This correlation, which in Benjamin takes forms likeThe past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred asredemption,5 was first established by Hegel through his dictumeverything rational must become real.6 The formula turns rea-

son (or the subject) into an arbiter for the modification of real-ity. Marxs statement that philosophers should transform the worldrather than explain it is a direct descendant of this Hegelian pos-tulate. This does not mean of course that the idea lacked anteced-ents. The turning point between the enlightened idea of history(historical change as catastrophe) and the post-Hegelian idea ofthe historical as a man-made activity lies perhaps in the theologicalcrisis prompted by the Lisbon earthquake of 1775 and the atten-dant development of the question of theodicy. The thing to notice

is that from that constellation on, the idea of history would neverbecome independent of the possibility of an intentional trans-formation of human societies. Some theorists of revolution likeFranois Furet have criticized what he considers an unwarrantedcentrality of revolution in the narrative of history.7

Benjamin adds a peculiar twist to this genealogy of social tem-porality by introducing a thinking of the messianic into the calcula-tion of history. As I would like to prove shortly, the introduction ofthe messianic testifies to Benjamins idea of an unbreakable con-

nection between history and politics. The idea of the messianic(whose embodiment is the tradition of the oppressed) endows Ben-jamins argument with an astounding historical depth and with anequally far-reaching conceptual inclusiveness along a synchronicaxis. It is a notion that reaches back to precapitalist eras as easily


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as it extends its conceptual arm to figures like the lumpenprole-tariat or the prepolitical peasant, all of them normally eschewedin a more conventional Marxist approach. The messianic is also a

principle of order in a universe of chaos. Redemption makes his-tory because history in itself is a pile of wreckageor, as FredricJameson once put it, is no other thing than the Real itself.8

The Theses were not Benjamins first approach to the ques-tions of history and revolution. In 1921, the same year that DiegoRivera returns to Mexico to participate in the vast postrevolution-ary experiment, he published one of his best-known essays: Onthe Critique of Violence. As suggested by the title, the argumentis composed in a Kantian key that calls for a pure (transcenden-

tal) investigation of violence. A pure critique of violence shouldsever violence from its ends, as a pure intuition severs the intu-ition from any impure form of materiality. Although the Critiqueof Violence and the Theses share many important featuresprominently among them the odd mixing of a Marxist-materialistlanguage with a messianic religious expression and the perennialalthough largely implicit criticism of Hegelianismwhat is mostinteresting are their differences. While Critique of Violence stilldreams of a pure relationship between intellect and law, the The-

ses not only abandon the terrain of purity, but elaborate a theoryof history in which past and present, the subjective and the objec-tive, appear simultaneously on the same plane.

The true nature of the historical that I referred to before in termsof a mutual constitution of history and revolution can be more prop-erly rephrased as follows: in a chronology dominated by the figuresof justice and injusticewithin a notion of the historical that hasredemption as its goalnothing is subject to death, or as Thesis IIIputs it, nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost

for history.9

Something to be noticed is that this conception of thehistorical is thoroughly teleological. The pair justice/injustice worksas its principle (in the ancient sense of arch) while also providing ameeting place for the languages of materialism and the messianic.Although this conjunction between principle and end is for Benja-min a condition of possibility of a genuine historical experience, itis not itself thought of as a structural or transcendental condition,but rather as the result of contingent historical unfolding. However,by nowby the time of Benjamins writingone cannot exist with-

out the other, to the point that our notion of the historical wouldlose all consistency without a reference to the foundational pair inquestion. The target of Benjamins criticism is, then, not teleologywhich is unavoidablebut historicism as an alienating ideology ofprovidentialism secularized as progress.


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70 Horacio Legrs

The identification of historicism as the epochal enemy of a mate-rialist thinker comes as a surprise for the contemporary reader. Thecritique of historicism is more commonly associated with paradigms

such as postcolonialism than with any variant of Marxism. Actually,Marxism is often singled out as an incarnation of some pervasivehistoricist tenets. The fact that a confrontation with fascism led Ben-jamin to this type of peripheral position of enunciation gives fur-ther credence to the argument, first mounted by Aim Csaire inhis Discourse on Colonialism (1955), that Nazism is in its essence adeployment of colonialism inside Europe itself. Benjamin aims forthe same epochal type of criticism at one point in the Theses.Speaking of a Marxism that has lost its way into the web of a bour-

geois worldview, Benjamin writes, It recognizes only the progress inthe mastery of nature, not the retrogression of society.10This criti-cism of modernity has clear connections with Max Horkheimersand Adornos writings on instrumental reason and a family resem-blance to Heideggers writings on enframing.It is also a position thatreaches to the post-phenomenological tradition that indicts reasonfor overreaching into realms that lie beyond its domain. Benjaminscriticism of historicism is, however, qualitatively different from theone that we may encounter in the works by authors like Emmanuel

Levinas (ontology as expression of an Imperial Ego) or postcolo-nialist critics like Robert Young (White Mythologies,1990). Benjaminscriticism is internal to the modernizing logos to which historicismitself is supposed to belong. It is criticism in its traditional sense,not a rejection. This criticism takes in the Theses a double-headedstrategy. It is simultaneously philosophical and political.

The Philosophical Aspect.Like any hegemonic construct, histori-cism is an ideology of which different positions imagine they cantake advantage, only to discover later (if enlightenment is granted)

how deeply indebted they are to a paradigm that they cannotmaster. Benjamin does not offer any explanation for why histori-cism has such a hold on so many different intellectual positions.A possible interpretation (suggested by the words of Benjaminjust quoted) could point towards a phenomenology of modernitythat the historicist and Benjamin read in radically different ways.The historicist looks around and sees technological innovationsand a massive accumulation of wealth, knowledge, and cultureand concludes that history is a process of constant and increasing

enlightenment. Benjamin, on the other hand, sees this progress asa version of the Fallan interpretation suggested by the moral ofthe famous passage of the angel of history in Thesis IX. The fall ofmodernity is a fall from reason into administrative forms of tech-nological governance.


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The ideology of progress that confuses technological improve-ment with human development clearly results in an alienationof the human into the technical. A historical time objectified

under a form of material progress is not human time any more.History itself appears estranged from its actors. Certainly, histori-cism invokes humanity in its constructions, but this is a genericnotion of the human and is not present in any particular man, touse the Aristotelian expression. Humanity, especially a humanitywhose time is dictated by figures of justice and injustice, oblivionand redemption, must out of necessity eschew this figure of thegeneral. It is not humanity in general that is the depository ofhistorical knowledge but rather the oppressed class.11(One can

detect in this passage a bold recasting of Georg Lukacss History andClass Consciousness[1923], a text that was Benjamins introductionto Marxism.) Benjamin does not deny that development and prog-ress are possible. But true historical advance can come only as aresult of the destruction of the nihilistic ground of society: its classstructure. Without this radical step, it will always live in the mirageof a progress towards which the historical materialist has to showcautious detachment.

The Political Aspect. The philosophical deficit of historicism is

the ground for a most troubling practice. The dogma of progressshows its worst face in the case of historical materialism, becauseit is only there that it can decisively affect the political praxis thatgrows in the shadow of the tradition of the oppressed. The Marx-ist, lured by a myth of progress whose final station is socialism, putstrust in a renewed form of providence for something that can beachieved only by means of historical agency. A subjectivity that livesthe present in the delusional expectation of a deliverance towardswhich it itself does not contribute is marked as the scandal of a

revolutionary soul living a nonrevolutionary life. It is because ofthe dire need to reposition revolutionary agency at the center ofthe historical process that Benjamin proclaims that class struggleand class struggle alone is the fundamental notion of historicalmaterialism.12

The Present as an Ethical Category

Historicism doesnt propose just a picture of the past, but moreconsequentially it implies a vision of the present. But what is thepresent? As always in the Theses, the grasp of a concept demandsa previous dismantling of the positions that induce error in anal-ysis. Historicisms greatest sin lies in reducing its relationship to


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outlook. The Theses contain an important indictment against thisintellectual form of denegationso many laughs at the expense ofPlato or Rousseau! But laughter is not an intellectual position. It is

a purely ideological (violent) principle grounded in what Adornoonce called the dubious good fortune to live later.18

A more adequate relationship between past and present isdeveloped in Theses I to IV, which describe the way in which paststruggles inform the perceptions and actions of the present. Theidea of a constitutive grip of the past over the present may soundlike a mere truism to those working on traditions like subalternityor postcolonialism. However it is an insight that went against thegrain of the ideology of progress in whose name Marx called upon

the poetry of the future to defeat the ghosts of the past in the 18thBrumaire of Louis Bonaparte,Nietzsche advocated for forgetting theuseless past in his essay On the Uses and Disadvantages of His-tory for Life, and Hegel simplified the work of past generationsthrough the notion of an ontohistorical Aufhebung in his Phenom-enology.It is also a deceptively simple statement. We will miss Ben-jamins point if we read this relationship between past and presentmerely in terms of remembrance. In my own paraphrases of Benja-min, I use expressions such as the past informs or has a constitu-

tive grip in order to emphasize the way the agency of the actionfalls upon the past as much as on the present.

Benjamin does not provide any explanation about how thisencroachment of past into present actually happens. Understand-ably, the question has been either ignored or thrown into the dust-bin of the messianic. I will try to follow a different path. It wouldbe possible to argue that for Benjamin the past engenders thepresent under the form of an intentional act. Intentional acthas tobe understood here in the phenomenological sense of the inten-

tionality of human consciousness. Humans do not simply bumpagainst the world. Instead, they orient themselves towards this tree,that house, or that river. They see these objects, identify them, ormisrecognize them. They give them names. Even in perception,human consciousness moves towards its objects as the what ofwhat this consciousness is about. In other words, the act of percep-tion is not passive but bears the mark of a constitutive subjectivity.Without this direction towards the world the actual experience ofliving would not be an experience at all, but a constant assault of the

outside upon a subject permanently under siege. Freud reasonedalong similar lines when he defined attention as a psychologicaldevelopment that allowed the mind to meet its objects halfway.19

The Freudian simile may be misleading, however. Intentionality isnot just the active side of cognition. What is intended is not equal


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74 Horacio Legrs

to what is perceived. Writing from inside the phenomenologicaltradition, Emmanuel Levinas could say that speaking is an intu-ition of sociality.20And the critics of the Geneva school thought

it possible to discern the traces of the consciousness of dead poetsand novelists encrypted in the way they intended the world in theirwritings.21 The English translation of the Theses has Benjaminhimself using the word intentional to refer to the habitation ofthe present by the past in Thesis V: For it is an irretrievable imageof the past which threatens to disappear in any present that doesnot recognize itself as intended in that image.22

The original German text does not contain any variant ofthe word intentional. Instead, Benjamin uses gemeint,which sig-

nals the part of meaning that depends on what we can call theillocutionary force of the speaker: what the speaker meant to say.Although it is not my goal to construct a philological argument, it isworthwhile to point out that Gemeinappears frequently in Husserlswriting. Husserl differentiates the meaning of a word (Sinn) fromits intended meaning (Gemein). It is precisely because an utteranceis not exhausted in its meaning (Sinn) or in the act of its receptionthat the past has a claim upon the present. Thus, [O]ur comingwas expected on earth,23does not mean that our coming was con-

sciously anticipated but rather that it was intended, in all its inde-termination, not by this particular subject or the other, but ratherby the transcendental structure of language. Finally, that languageis transcendental does not mean that is not factical. These wordsto which we are still indebted are words that were once uttered(parole in Saussures sense) but not without the intentionality ofconsciousness coloring (indexing, Benjamin would have said) thevery structure of language (la langue in Saussure terms) via theevent of speech. Thus intentionality remains readable in the more

general dimension of language.

The Present as Inherently Revolutionary Time

In the Theses, the present represents not only an ethical cate-gory, but also the transcendental condition of possibility of revolu-tion in general. As we have seen, historical truth pertains to therelation through which past and present are mutually constituted.

However, something momentous happens to this truth in the actof its revelation. The ideality of truth does not survive its own com-ing into existence. Once revealed, the true knowledge of the pastpasses the tremulous frontier between the historical and the politi-cal. It disappears as historical image (never seen again) only to be


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born as political consciousness. This is the time of the Jetztzeit,thenow-time, the time of recognition and empowerment. Once thepast has breached the autonomy of the present, the present has

to react to this loss of autonomy. On the one hand, the presentloses its claim to sovereignty upon the past, because it knows itselfpermanently assaulted and constituted by these images in which itrecognizes itself. On the other hand, this knowledge engendersin the present the consciousness of its own being. It belongs toitself more deeply by knowing that it is not self-sufficient and self-constituted. This knowledge provides the present with its sense ofnonalienated time. It is at the point when the present is lived in anauthentic way (Benjamin doesnt use this word) that the present

time becomes revolutionary time.Authentic time and revolutionary time are coeval terms. Thecase for the identity of present and revolution is not Benjaminsdiscovery, but rather a persistent subject in the bibliography onrevolutionalthough sources relating to this question do notabound.24Benjamin himself remains silent on this subject, and hedoes not broach the point until the last sentence of his text andthen only in a veiled form: the present is the strait gate throughwhich the Messiah might enter.25The best rationale for the per-

vasive identification of nonalienated present with revolution isindebted, once again, to Hegel. The equation rests on the fact thatwhen the present knows itself to be present, this knowledge trig-gers a transformative action upon reality. To be in ones presentis to be bound to action. As in the case of the proverbial Hegelianfigure of the man absorbed in the contemplation of a landscapeand who can only be brought back to himself (to the present of hisexperience) through desire, the result of the gathering of the his-torical subject upon himself cannot but end in an outburst of activ-

ity designed to negate an alienating reality and to impose its willupon the world. In the Hegelian story, paraphrased by AlexandreKojve, a desire (hunger) makes the contemplating man returnto himself and propel him into action. Likewise, a nonalienatedpresent is constrained to recognize its actual rather than illusorysovereignty upon the world.

The Intentional Transformation of the Past

By now what counts as present (and more importantly aspresence)in our experience of the historical has been greatly complicated.The complexity of the mutual determination of past and present(history and politics) is revealed to its full extent in Thesis IV, which


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represents the conceptual culmination of Benjamins text for thepurpose of my essay. The thesis reads,

Class struggle, which for a historian schooled in Marx is always in evi-dence, is a fight for the crude and material things without which norefined and spiritual things could exist. But the latter things, which arepresent in class struggle, are not present as a vision of spoils that fall tothe victor. They are alive in this struggle as confidence, courage, humor,cunning and fortitude, and have effects that reach far back into the past.They constantly call into question every victory, past and present, of therulers. As flowers turn towards the sun, what has been strives to turnbydint of a secret heliotropismtowards that sun which is rising in the skyof history. The historical materialist must be aware of this most incon-spicuous of all transformations.26

The thesis is preceded by an epigraph from Hegel that reads,Seek for food and clothing first, then the kingdom of God shallbe added unto you. I dont believe, as Michael Lwy argues, thatBenjamins use of this quote manages to turn an idealist Hegel intoa crude materialist. At first sight, the subversion of Hegels assumedintention seems to serve that purpose. That is, if we replaceclass struggle with food and clothing, the epigraph seems tosay: attend to class struggle first and cultureeven the great docu-

ments of culturewill come as a mere by-product. But one canequally argue that what the thesis develops is a very Hegelian com-plication of what counts as material and spiritual, and that withoutthis complication the whole process of the intentional transforma-tion of the present by the past would be simply untenable.27

The complication of what counts as material and spiritualhappens at the level of the split between both concepts. In otherwords, the interpretation of the quote (and of the differencebetween material/spiritual) hinges on the value of the then that

separates the two hemistiches in Hegels quote. In my reading, thethen is not a logical or consequential particle. The quote doesnot say, then, that the kingdom will be granted on the bases of acausal relationship. (The English translation suggests this causalrelationship not so much because of the then but rather becauseof the verbal phrase added unto you. Spanish and Portuguesetranslations of the same quote use the impersonal verb advenirtowhich no doeror giveris attached.) If the then is not con-sequential, everything happens as though the obtaining of food

and clothing opens, simultaneously and without difference, thekingdom of survival and the kingdom of God. The problem hereis that language is not subtle enough to describe this Hegelianmoment in which an identity needs to split in order to be for itselfas well as for its other. The then introduces a temporalization


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that exists only at the figural level of language, but not in reality.In reality, the material and the cultural emerge as the product ofa disjunctive synthesis.

The realm of the spirit is also doubled or split. It is representedby thingsworks of art, documents of civilizationbut it is alsopresent as a set of less tangible attributes. Benjamin lists five: con-fidence, courage, humor, cunning and fortitude.28The importantpoint is that these qualities close the circle, so to speak. They reachfar back into the past29and, since they cannot be objectified as thespoils of the victors, they directly connect the spiritual realm offine things to the crass realities of class struggle in a positive way.They are the representatives of culture in class struggle (proving

once again that the material and the cultural emerge in simultane-ous identity in difference). Aside from the reason Benjamin mayhave had to pick these five specific qualities (a point that Lwysdiscussion illuminates), what is certain is that an intentional subjec-tive structure is, by definition, a strong component of their being.Moreover, it is only insofar as they represent intentions that theycan give place to a fluid transformation of past and present.

It is at this point that we should notice that the historical exis-tence of these five attributes of the oppressed that permanently call

into question every victory of the oppressors follows a tortuous paththat we have not encountered so far. In a superficial reading, it mayseem that what Benjamin is saying is just that the cunning of thepresent struggle points towards the tradition of the oppressed in asort of continuityalong the lines of remembrance la Bakhtin.30

The reasoning seems to be chronologically linear, which it cannotbe since a genuine relationship to the past has already been estab-lished as one of mutual determination. When the past flashes upinto the present, the agency of the rememorative praxis falls obvi-

ously on the present. However, Benjamin says that it is what hasbeen (the past, not the present) that strives to turn towards thatsun which is rising in the sky of history. The past is the subject ofthis imperceptible heliotropism. The past is not said and done.Here Benjamin takes to a new level his radical assertion of the ulti-mate identity of politics and history. It is not just that any politics isinformed by history. But if the identity between the historical andthe political is going to hold, any history of the oppressed classes(who are the only subject of history, because they are the only ones

interested in fostering the dialectical process of change) shouldbe marked by the politics of the future. This does not happen inremembranceand this is the scandal of this passagebut in actu-ality. Benjamin refers to this transformation of the past as this mostinconspicuous of all transformations.


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offered a solution to this quandary by assimilating the masses inrevolt to an almost millenary tradition of insurgent fight in Meso-america. Nationalism was simultaneously flexible and powerful

enough to reach almost every corner of such a variegated constitu-ency. We would be mistaken, then, if we saw in nationalism a merelyrepresentational activity. Through nationalism, Mexicans did notjust learn to be Mexicans, but learned to socially and politicallyinhabit a country they had already conquered and occupied. Thisis, incidentally, a very Benjaminian point: the object of the revolu-tionary action is not justnot even fundamentallythe obtrusiverealm of reality or materiality, but rather the constitution of a dif-ferent type of subjectivity.

An upper-class painter educated in Europe and an active par-ticipant of the Cubist bohme, Diego Rivera embraced a form ofpainting that identified in subject and style with the popular tra-ditions of the Mexican people after his return to Mexico. Thesetraditions, it is worthwhile to recall, were not readily available forappropriation. While the emphasis on the popular and the indig-enous were routinely demanded from any cultural production ofthe period, there were few people with the knowledge and quali-fications to actually bring this realm of the popular into life and

representation. The task of Rivera and of so many others was toinvent a tradition out of a highly disjointed and prejudiced set ofcultural autochthonous values.

An unexpected use of Christian imagery at the level of repre-sentation and a more predictable recourse to enumeration at thelevel of composition are the stylistic benchmarks of those muralssuch as the Courtyard of Laborand the Courtyard of Fiestasat the Sec-retary of Education (Secretara de Educacin Pblica [SEP]) andthe History of Mexicopainted on the walls of the National Palace.

Although Rivera had studied Renaissance murals in some detailhe referred to them as books for the illiteratethe public presentat the inauguration of the murals at the SEP were astonished bywhat they perceived as an odd mixture of social Marxist critique(condemnation of private property, exploitation, colonialism) andallusions to a Christian iconography. For Rivera, the Christian tra-dition provided a dignified version of the popular classes, a versionthat considers the popular sector to be exemplary of the categoryof the human in general, elevating these groups to a universality

thus far denied to them. Rivera, however, borrowed from Chris-tianity not its iconographic tradition (in which a certain figurecarries an already codified meaning) but rather a mode of figura-tion. The elevation of the neglected people to prototypes of theuniversal did not detach them from their place and their time. It


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entailed, rather, a carnivalesque inversion of the religious imag-ery. Instead of these peasants and Indians becoming more saintlyand ethereal, saintliness became more mundane and embodied.

Meanwhile the trope of enumeration was mobilized as the idealmedium for a maximum effort of incorporation. Enumeration ishere the pictorial equivalent of populism as the ingrained ideologyof the revolution. The Courtyard of Fiestaspresents the viewer withan apparently endless string of human faces that cover the wholemural. No figure stands out as allegorizing or symbolizing the joysand sufferings of all.

However, I will argue that Riveras final goal did not lie in rep-resentation but rather in affection. In a proper Benjaminian way,

Riveras problem became how the past modifies the present andhow the present could have a redemptive effect on the past. Inaddressing this question, I will circumscribe my comments to thecentral wall of the History of Mexico.From the title of the mural, weappreciate Riveras intention to place the revolution in the mostgeneral context of the historical existence of the Mexican people.The avowed intention of the mural is to retell the history of Mexicofrom the vantage point of the underdogs.

As viewers enter the central patio of the National Palace to con-

template the mural, they are invited into a pictorial journey thatstarts with the pre-Columbian civilizations, the arrival of HernnCorts to the coast of Mexico, the defeat of Tenochtitlan, and therise of the white God. At the opposite specter of time, we find thefigures of Marx and Lenin, who show the way to the future to theMexican workers. Everywhere, through every century and decade,Rivera paints the anonymous faces of Indians and peasants, not asbackgrounds but as present-ghosts of the historical process. (Riverasenormous subtlety: Some of these figures have their backs turned

to the spectator. They are as unreachable for them as they were forRivera.) Now, what is the time of the present? The present is outsiderepresentation. It is the time of the spectator, of the single, titanicgaze that should incorporate this totality into its own moment ofapprehension. But it is also the time of the return of the contem-plating gaze upon itself since, as spectators, we are driven out ofthe representation and forced into our own temporality. (Thiseffect is not unrelated to the fact that in all likelihood the viewerhas to be constantly moving, pushed forward through the stairs of

the national palace and lacking therefore any point of view fromwhich the totality can be at the same time visible and distinguish-able in all its subtle details.) There is only one possibility left to theviewers: to accept this historical concatenation as their own history.This merely situational reading of the mural is emphasized by the


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composition of the central wall. Leonard Folgarait, who reads theHistory of Mexicoas a pedagogical form of propaganda, exempts thecentral panel from this reading: The historical episodes on the cen-

tral wall can be seen as merely mixed and juxtaposed, next to andamongst each other because they belong in that history all at onceas equals, and not necessarily positioned by order of occurrence orhistorical importance.32After emphasizing that this quality is notshared by the two side walls, Folgarait remarks that

[t]his refusal by the mural to compose according to the linear narrativeproperties of episodic history . . . creates [one important effect:] themural is not, in spite of its site and subject matter, in spite of its purpose,didactic in any explicit manner. . . . [E]ach separate knowing produces its

own telling/viewing. Zapatistas will view it differently, will actually see it asa different visual construct, than will carranzistas, Americans differentlythan Spaniards.33

Folgaraits analysis is perhaps too colored by his own, ideolog-ically based reading of the murals. In this analysis, subjectivitiespreexist the encounter with the mural: they are either Carrancis-tas, Americans, or Zapatistas. I think, on the other hand, that themurals aimed to create an identity rather than to confirm a subjec-

tive disposition. In my reading, a central panel is not a collage ofdifferent possibilities of identification from which the viewer canchoose. Taken as a whole, the central panel seems to say that in his-tory one cannot choose. Rivera includes in the murals characterswith whom he could not possibly identify, people whom he actu-ally abhorred: bankers, ruthless exploitative emissaries of the Span-ish empire first and of the American empire later; Luis Toral, theCatholic fanatic who killed President Obregn. If the time of thenow is going to redeem all past sufferings and misgivings, nothing

of this past can be renounced. Yet, it is not a matter of looking tothe past objectively, so to speak. To the contrary, it means overcom-ing the difference between the subjective and the objective. All thatstands as mere datum to be observed has to be taken into the pres-ent, made the stuff of the viewers life. This process through whichan alienated past becomes the stuff of an emancipated present isoften referred in Lacanian psychoanalysis as subjectification. In theterrain of art and politics the word reproduction might indicatea similar process.34The history that has merely happened needs to

be brought back to life in the light of the present. The past is notjust reproduced as dead weight, but instead turned into a site ofa productive reproduction that engenders both past and presentin their mutual determination. The viewer has to make the pre-Columbian civilization, the heroes of independence, the anony-mous backs of peasant Indians, and the recognizable figures of the


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Benjamin would have found comfort in this idea that offers arenovated rationale for his permanent revolution. But not know-ing, as Rivera was well aware, will always be a weak rationale for

inaction. It is at this point that the seemingly paradoxical inclu-sion of Christian imaginary to convey the history of the underdogsbecomes relevant once again. Rivera recognizes Christianity as thatlanguage in which generations of oppressed people safeguardedthe singularity of their own earthly life. The clergy and the churchare certainly denounced in the murals, and Christianity is put ontrial, and yet the popular allegiance to religion is absolved. Christi-anity is not only accepted, but respected as one of the most power-ful embodiments of the tradition of the oppressed. It is respected

in the hope that as a language it has indexed and included allthe clamors that it rescues, all the voices that it obliterates. Riverarefuses to depict Christianity as a form of false consciousness, butsimultaneously he refuses to grant to Christianity the role of thehistorical voice of the oppressed. The use of a Christian figurationsupplements the struggles of the present, but in such a way thatthe present is also able to color with unmistakable materialist over-tones the more metaphysical tradition that sustains it. It brings thistradition to life in a new way, and allows it to speak in a new lan-

guage. In this careful disaggregation of the documents of culturefrom the ghosts that they carry lies Riveras wager for a renewedalliance between history and revolution.

Notes

1 See, for instance, chapter 1 in Raul Ruizs The Great Rebellion: Mexico 19051924(New York: Norton, 1980) and also Leonard Folgaraits hesitation about the

word revolution in his Mural Painting and Social Revolution in Mexico, 19201940:

Art of the New Order(Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 5.

2 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and HistoricalDifference(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 6.

3 For the history of the text, see the introduction to Michael LwysFire Alarm:Reading Walter Benjamins On the Concept of History(London: Verso, 2006).

4 There is a large secondary bibliography on Benjamin and the Theses. Forthe purpose of this essay, I have consulted, besides Michael Lwys acute book, Ron-ald Beiners essay, Walter Benjamins Philosophy of History, Political Theory12, no.3 (1984): 42334; and the volume edited by Andrew Benjamin, Walter Benjamin and

History(London: Continuum, 2005).5Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, in Illuminations,ed.

Hanna Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 25364, quotation on 254.

6 Herbert Marcuse attributes this statement to Hegel in Reason and Revolution:Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory(New York: Humanities Press, 1958), 45.


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7 Francois Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution(Cambridge, MA: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1981), 1112.

8 Fredric Jameson, Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan, in The Ideologies of The-

ory(London: Verso, 2008), 77124, quotation on 92.9 Benjamin, Illuminations,254.

10 Ibid., 259.

11 Ibid., 260.

12 Ibid., 25455

13 I am referring here to the already classic study by Johannes Fabian: Time andthe Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Objects(New York: Columbia University Press,1983).

14

Benjamin, Illuminations,255.15 Ibid.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid., 257.

18 Theodor Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies,trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cam-bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 1.

19 Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. JamesStrachey (New York: Norton, 1965), 23.

20 Emmanuel Levinas, Is Ontology Fundamental? in Basic Philosophical Writ-ings, ed. Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi, Studies inContinental Thought series (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 110.

21 For a thorough explanation of phenomenology in literary criticism, seeRobert Magliola, Phenomenology and Literature: An Introduction (West Lafayette, IN:Purdue University Press, 1977). See also J. Hillis Miller, The Geneva School: TheCriticism of Marcel Raymond, Albert Bguin, Georges Poulet, Jean Rousset, Jean-Pierre Richard, and Jean Starobinski, in Theory Now and Then(New York: Harvester

Wheatsheaf, 1991), 1330.

22 Benjamin, Illuminations,255.

23 Ibid., 254.

24A discussion of present and revolution can be found in Stathis KouvelakissPhilosophy and Revolution: From Kant to Marx, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London:

Verso, 2003), 35 and passim. The equation between knowledge and action is dis-located in some contemporary accounts of the social such as Peter Sloterdjiks Cri-tique of Cynical Reason,trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1987).

25 Benjamin, Illuminations,254.

26 Ibid.

27 Hegels phrase appears in a letter to his friend Karl Knebel in the context of avery explicit assertion of materiality. Hegel is talking about how his duties as teacherand editor allowed him to write his speculative work. For a reference to the letter toKnebel and an illuminating comment on the word granted (which translates herethe German zufallen), see note 5 by the editors to the Theses on the Philosophy


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of History, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 19381940,ed. HowardEiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA:Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 398.

28

Benjamin, Illuminations,255.29 Ibid.

30 In his book on Rabelais, Mikhail Bakhtin sees the novel as containing (andsaving) a carnivalesque principle in the epoch of noncarnival (Rabelais and HisWorld[Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984]).

31 See Mary Kay Vaughan, ed., The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revo-lution in Mexico 19201940(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). Althoughmore centered on the role of the state, a similar argument in favor of culture as aninstrument of political stabilization is made by Thomas Benjamin in La Revolucion:Mexicos Great Revolution as Memory, Myth, and History (Austin: University of TexasPress, 2008).

32 Leonard Folgarait, Mural Painting and Social Revolution in Mexico, 19201940:Art of the New Order(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 101.

33 Ibid., 102.

34 For the Lacanian notion of subjectification see Bruce Fink, The LacanianSubject(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).

35 David Lloyd, Irish Times: Temporalities of Modernity(Dublin: Field Day, 2008), 12.

Documents

Walter Benjamin and the Mexican Revolution