Jour fixe initiative Frankfurt:

Peter Wehling - Freeing history from the 'spell' of progress

The idea of progress that emerged in the 18th century, of a rationally guided advancement of humanity throughout the course of history, has, despite numerous attempts to rescue it, lost much of its radiance and persuasive power today. Nevertheless, in Western modern societies, prevailing conceptions and notions of history and historical time remain under the “spell” of progress, which Theodor W. Adorno discussed: history continues to be imagined as a one-dimensional and irreversible movement “forward,” into a future assumed to be open. Thus one speaks of history, of a “historical” event, only when something genuinely or supposedly “new” and “unique” occurs.

Drawing on both Walter Benjamin’s critique of the notion of “empty and homogeneous” time underlying the idea of progress, as well as on more recent reflections on “regimes of historicity” and a “symmetric historiography,” the lecture argues that an understanding of history as an unstoppable “advancing” from an apparently completed past is of little use for emancipatory politics. Instead, it advocates not relying (solely) on an allegedly open future for social change, but rather (also) on the “actualization” (Benjamin) of suppressed and forgotten emancipatory potentials and perspectives of the past.

The event is part of the series “The Future of History”, which will run throughout the year. Click here for the programme!