This text was presented in January at the 2010 Telos Conference, “From Lifeworld to Biopolitics: Empire in the Age of Obama.”
President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Messianic peace was signified by the person conservatives and liberals labeled “messiah” or “the One.”[1] The Nobel committee symbolically demonstrated deliverance by promises of “change” and “hope.”[2] One week before the award another part of a media eschaton materialized: publicly contemplating a military coup to thwart the “Obama problem.” Appealing to U.S. military leaders in eight, compact bullet points, a well-credentialed journalist wrote: “Military intervention is what Obama’s exponentially accelerating agenda for ‘fundamental change’ toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America. A coup is not an ideal option, but Obama’s radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible.”[3] If right-wing American media, through its core of movement conservatism, announced Obama martyrdom, the Nobel Committee announced resurrection.
Obama’s idealistic presidential campaign dramatically moved audiences. Conversely, executive Obama demonstrates a conservative realism.[4] Sam Tanenhaus notes as much describing postwar conservatism as one distinguished by movement “revanchist counter-revolutionaries” and realists.[5] Revanchist’s orthodox, recta ratio, “right reason,” draws radicalistic authority from foundations of metaphysical and religious thought.[6] Revanchist’s hostility toward technocratic institutions both governmental and civic defines contemporary political theory.[7] Obama’s governance attempts to stabilize revanchism.[8] His Oslo acceptance speech is indicative of such: part repudiation of messianic symbolization, another, restoration of the Just War doctrine, and to the dismay of some, affirmation of unilateralism. Tanenhaus’s polity is a Burkean replenishment of adjustment and accommodation comprised of American’s who are both liberal and conservative that “cling to the past” and “push forward into the future.”[9] This polity reconciles Burke’s “prejudices” (cherished notions and beliefs) with George Santayana’s “animal faith” (arational claims to knowledge) by “demands of unanticipated events.” Political activity he further defines as a “public expression of . . . drama, the theatre in which the modus vivendi of our civil society is continually enacted—and replenished.”[10]
From Burke’s vantage revanchism is a dysfunctional excess that over-improves established order as it really existed. In this way revanchism parallels the civil rights movement.[11] History demonstrates that malleable liberal democratic form absorbs revolution into the State. In contemporary politics however, it is difficult to ascertain social movements not captured within media technologies.[12] Giorgio Agamben’s divine governance, oikonomia, insists a religious element remains central to devices and apparatuses, such may indicate a revanchist grievance beneath ideological explanation.[13] Apparatuses, for Agamben, are violence machines that capture and standardize natural history, language, and community.[14] Our experience in this division takes place through boundaries of subjectification.[15] The metaphysics of presence may find its simulation in technology, as a one-way transmission of truth. Would such lead one to believe they incarnate the law, that they are, in some way, exceptional?
Centrism, consensus, and Burkean computation, the technology of modern governance, faces a continuing crisis. Revanchist-inspired congressional opposition to every legislative effort Obama initiates is a death knell to the consensus of old. Recent electoral losses by movement republicans have failed to “update the brand,” indicating the GOP lack stability as well.[16] Revanchism evades stabilization into a movement or ideology. Claiming ideological independence, the Tea Party movement underscores that claim with calls for a second American Revolution. Conversely, a thick published stream of psychotic depictions by liberal pornographers establish conservative revanchists as demented psychopaths or some authoritarian aberration. While pertinent, this misses the mark.[17] Revanchist political expression demonstrates a crisis of exposition and evasive performance. Had we learned anything from Erich Fromm, crisis will provide an escape from freedom. Do we face, in the advent of the revanchist, a genuine crisis beyond the paranoia politics of the past?[18] One of authoritarian salvation, provided it is not already in the form the device? Do we risk becoming mere bodies breathing history, the true Left Behind, should we fail to understand contemporary polarization humanizes subjects that in turn diminishes counsel and civility?
A subject-object dialectic pronounces itself in revanchism. Walter Benjamin articulates something similar in his dialectical image of storyteller and novelist. The dialectical image examples the concealing and revealing of death. Subjectifications, first demonstrated by the novel, are devoid of counsel once bound in experience necessary for authentic speech. In regards to authoritarianism would such emerge as revanchism’s spirited, animal faith? Would this technicized vivendi, hypostatized through the novelistic modality of devices in the hands of contemporary subjects, allow one to “defend society” against its own revolutionary determination? How do we, or should we, prevent our own radicalization as speech continues toward origination in technological order increasingly historical opposed to natural?
Subjective Aspection
Benjamin’s storyteller fell into atrophy by way of information; drifting into appearance, by way of the novel.[19] A new beauty was possible in this vanishing yet he remains unclear as to what comes after. Conversely, he criticized information that standardized the storyteller’s communicability of experience.[20] A golden web of natural history we departed. Consequently, we entered a multi-colored web, a history of salvation through devices, similar to what Agamben calls a “humanization” of language from living being.[21] Animal faith and cherished prejudice demonstrates revanchism and realism are indicative of such. Thus a general trend between Tanenhaus, Agamben, and Benjamin in the transition from storyteller to novelist is feasible. These divisions fall under two margins: insubstantial being and imperceptible reason.
If subjectivity increases toward a monaural experience truth would be verification privileging transmission over listening. Verification, in Benjamin’s critique, is the essence of information which depends on newness to survive.[22] One would experience memory robust with verification giving a messianic aspect to content.[23] Would a beautiful vanishing reveal itself through such verification? Confusion of imperceptible content with insubstantial being can be read through Benjamin’s insights of Marcel Proust’s mémoire involontaire, integral to Agamben’s apparatuses.[24] Erlebnis is attributable to experience with media. Microtargeting represents a manifested broadcast of Erfahrungen, what Benjamin calls a constellation.[25] Activity nominates a humanized historical neighborhood, a being stellation, “the work,” within reflecting images. Erlebnis constitutes a bodily aspect recalled from figures of storage, of species and devices. Erlebnis and Erinnerung thus constitute aspects of content formation through novel-devices.
Agamben defines image as a non-substantive accident occurring in subjects.[26] Contemplating image-reflection he defines species as the capture of living being. A Latin translation from the Greek eidos, or form.[27] Species results from “a religious nucleus,” a violent fracture[28] removing life from the commons, transitioning Erfahrung and Erlebnis into apparatuses via devices.[29] Agamben elaborates species by “aspect,” “vision,” and “appearance.” Humanization is a process viewed by living, given being remains partially insubstantial.[30] Aspect, in relation to species “cannot be determined according to the category of quantity . . . it is not a form or an image but rather the ‘aspect of the image or of a form.'” Image dimensions cannot be measured quantities; rather what he calls “aspects of species, modes of being and ‘habits.'” Agamben gives a subjective depth at which we enter content’s logic, what I call species by subjective aspection.[31] In his words “it is never a thing . . . only a ‘kind of thing’.”[32] Aspect’s earliest OED definition refers to astrology. One can be in the aspect of a world. Aspection, a kind of thing is not wholly species, rather, an interpretative ratio or framework, an insubstantial and imperceptible confusion. Aspecting structures thus behold species in occultation. Novels are forbearers of such devices: aspect being of specified-worlds.
Aspection of species rubs up to Benjamin’s perplexed reader who “sees himself living this written life.” In contemporary media we are all novelist living our speciated stories. Yet Benjamin claims “the novelist cannot take a step beyond the limit at which he writes,” aspect will not suffice. For Benjamin this limit “invites the reader to a divinatory realization of the meaning of life.”[33] If the divinatory meaning of life—the center of the novel device—is the end, would it not indicate a reflective space for an eschatological experience withheld from actualization? Species portends a messianic experience by recovering language in aspect. Aspect is an experience beyond a novelistic soliloquy of imago logic, after the end, thus eschatological. This presents aspect as tenoring sensorial negation through opaque content. Considering the uncanny it is the problem of the subject after deconstruction, after desubjectification, and beyond fraudulent counsel.
In 1916, twenty years prior to The Storyteller, Benjamin wrote to Martin Buber contemplating “the crystal pure elimination of the ineffable in language.” Elimination is technology’s claim on language through writing. Benjamin’s language occurs from a “magical . . . un-mediated” source.[34] In other words, he questions making apparent an insubstantial, living-being, through writing and “the work.” Benjamin mentions a “linguistic magic.” Content potentiates magic, Agamben’s possibility of “knowing being as such,” a crystallized language-window built by living being.[35] In Benjamin’s words he questions the “dignity and nature,” what cannot be “transmitted through content.” At the beginning of The Storyteller, aspection is taken up once more. Benjamin notes a fundamental experience of image, for him, had changed.[36] His storyteller vanishes into “outline,” that is, into an aspect of the historical, delineated by growing distance, perceptible in departure.[37] Humanization fills this gap which Agamben advises: “if the interval between recognition is indefinitely prolonged the image becomes internalized as fantasy and love falls into psychology.”[38] According to Benjamin what “precludes psychological shading” is the “chaste compactness” of a particular a-historical being. Microtargeting pioneer, Mark J. Penn calls this “the art of trendspotting.” Through polls, he insists, the primary goal of microtargeting “is to find groups . . . that have either started to come together or can be brought together by the right appeal that crystallizes their needs.”[39] Penn’s enthusiastic language-crystallization serves Burkian order, more properly, it is his only revelation. For Agamben, this is the most “implacable apparatus,” a transformation of what he calls “the species into a principle of identity and classification.”[40] To fully substantiate being is to exist being into absolute species. Language would be mere instrumentality. Aspect evades total crystallization by the State.[41] Samuel Weber describes Benjamin’s thoughts on language-medium not as instrumental, but rather, theological-mystical “which, hypothesizes and hypostatizes language as an end in itself.” Benjamin’s language theory addresses this abyssal end. Weber likens such to Deleuzian virtuality with one major reversal: the virtual would be the reality of the structure rather than, as Deleuze would have it “[the] structure as the reality of the virtual” coinciding, he continues, with Derrida’s “structural possibility rather than in view of their actual realization.” In this way, language humanization, from Agamben’s division hypostatizes into a surface, the tentative ground by which revanchist express messianic aspection.[42]
Thinking Benjamin’s Crystal Motif
A mineral vein reflects through Benjamin’s text. At the end of The Storyteller, Benjamin analyses Leskov, and tells of one who “descends on the lower scale of created things.”[43] Storyteller’s have, he notes “ventured in the depths of inanimate nature” beholding (for Leskov’s character) a chrysoberyl, the mineral gemstone from “the lowest stratum of created things.” This gem is “directly related to the highest [thing].”[44] A crystalline stone allows a view across the entire ladder of experience, of species. Leskov’s subject he notes “is granted the ability to see . . . a natural prophecy of petrified, lifeless nature” this prophecy “applies to the historical world in which he himself lives.” This artisan craft, a seer’s sight which moves through stone establishes a “connection” between “soul, eye and hand,” however, according to Benjamin, this praxis we are no longer familiar with.[45] Thus our storyteller without counsel drifts through windows from the house of language into apparatuses of neighborhoods.
Benjamin’s death was pushed from living perception. Agamben concurs with one departure: the possibility of the good or happiness one is drawn to in the device.[46] Benjamin’s novel, Larry Rickels theorizes, is an inoculation against the dead. Death pushed from perception—concealing negation in structures—is reintroduced through the novel-device and the hospital, which “uncanny-proof our home.” These structures administer, in his words, “the Gospel.” Experience, meeting a notable limit in the trauma of the Great War, as Benjamin noted, finds its secularized image-logic in the device. A simulation, or opaque death, is reintroduced through species repetition. Trauma divided from, and returned to experience, comes through the asylum-device. PTSD victims, the dubiousness of the RMA, and the disjunction of war time reintegration reported by the informatic media has concealed and revealed asylum-death to the polis. The fantastical success of the PS3 Call of Duty war game series further evidences such phenomena.
Aspect’s grammatical definition squares with the uncanny: a relation to passing time, in particular, through repetition. Aspect is thus an unknown-familiar.[47] The crystal motif through Benjamin’s contemplation of the dialectical image presents a multifaceted clue.[48] Within this image a new counsel may await.[49] Benjamin notes historical progression moves being toward universality, into stone-being. Memory’s standardization eliminates the insubstantial as its primary builder. Revolutionized and radicalized inside the historical we commit, in Benjamin’s words, “political action” that “however destructive, reveals itself as messianic.”[50] A developing life expresses this messianic grief through asylum-salvation. When Benjamin wrote “[t]he seer’s gaze . . . kindled by the rapidly receding past,” did he articulate the revanchist’s view who “perceives the contours of the future in the fading light of the past as it sinks before him in the night of times”?[51] Would viewing the ladder of species demonstrate the determination and determining experience of aspection?[52] Determination opens an obscured future, which throws light into crystallized language.[53] Benjamin’s constellation, a single moment is the multi-colored web mediated by bodies transmitting this stream of immanent past into species. This dialectical image presents aspection recalling and generating historical experience.
Revanchist fidelity to standardization, millennial youths faith to the order of diversity and high exposure to death-simulation, indicate a surpassing of industrialization’s claim on being. Benjamin’s historians and prophets cooperatively turned their backs to the past and obscured a view of the future yet revanchist emerge from Benjamin’s “chamber” as both.[54] This chamber, the novel-device, transmits an infantile politics aspect hints as a new surface for originary language. Benjamin’s novel is memory’s tomb, what we inevitably submit to, but also arise from. Standardized experience in its end, may safeguard being from being the last stone of the State.
Notes
1. This article features commentary by Huffington Post writer Justin Frank, who criticizes Hilary Clinton for characterizing Obama’s rhetoric as “celestial . . . magical thinking.” Franks goes on to contemplate Clinton’s quote “celestial choirs will be singing,” referring to Obama’s entrance into the presidency as some sort of divine deliverance. I find it necessary to grasp on to Franks understanding of hope, because, as he states, hope in its most “primitive form” is in fact magical thinking, which, if we consider the decreasing capacity of an informed and reasoning polis, this hope would certainly be magical, and even messianic. As for our thesis, what Bush is for voters so too should Obama signify.
2. “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people a hope for a better future.”
3. “Obama Risks Military ‘Intervention'” was hastily taken down from Newsmax.com. It was republished by Mediamatters.org.
4. Obama’s political nature “temperamentally conservative” p. 117, see Sam Tanenhaus, The Death of Conservatism (New York: Random House, 2009).
5. Ibid., pp. 20-21.
6. An interesting segment opens in Tanenhaus’s first chapter for our analysis of revanchism. “In his pioneering essay “The Convenient State” (1961), the twenty-six-year-old Garry Wills, at the time the most promising young conservative thinker in America, clarified the distinction: “A consensus, as the word’s form indicates, is a meeting of several views to a single view. Consensus implies compromise, establishing a minimal ground of agreement on which to base political organization. Orthodoxy goes to the roots of metaphysical and religious awareness and demands a ‘right view’ on these things, not merely a modus vivendi. (The contemporary word for ‘ideology’).” Tanenhaus, The Death of Conservatism, pp. 16, 21.
7. Tanenhaus clarifies the differences of revanchist and realist: Burke “had warned against the destabilizing perils of extremist politics of any kind” his conservatism was based “on distrust of all ideologies” (ibid., p. 16).
8. Political reason, for Burke, is “a computing principle, a matter of ‘adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing’ the emphasis on continual adjustment and recalibration of the existing order” (ibid., p. 17).
9. Ibid., pp. 27, 118 quote.
10. This truth of American politics provides a “place for authentic conservatism that seeks not to destroy, but to conserve” (ibid., p. 118).
11. Tanenhaus acknowledges Willmore Kendall, conservative political thinker who wrote: “adherents of revolutionary movements, right and left…can be described as people ‘who will not take NO for an answer'” (ibid., p. 15).
12. Therefore the journalist who searches out where terrorist are “radicalized” pose a rather multifaceted question. National Public Radio, All Things Considered, December 28, 2009, journalist discusses radicalization through an examination of online content in attempt to locate where it takes place.
13. Agamben notes in his theological genealogy of divine economy this is similar to “the oikonomia introduced in God between being and action” (p. 16). “If we consider . . . the theological genealogy of apparatuses . . . (a genealogy that connects them to the Christian paradigm of oikonomia . . . the divine governance of the world) we can then see that modern apparatuses differ from their traditional predecessors in a way that renders any attempt to profane them particularly problematic” (p. 19). See Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus? trans. David Kishik and Stephan Pedatella (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2009).
14. “Indeed, every apparatus implies a process of subjectification, without which it cannot function as an apparatus of governance, but is rather reduced to a mere exercise of violence” (ibid., p. 20).
15. Apparatuses “separates the living being from itself and from its immediate relationship with its environment” (ibid. p. 16).
16. A recent special election in New York District 23 went awry for movement revanchist whose national figures drastically altered the race ousting what they viewed as a liberal interloper (centrist republican) for a movement ideologue. The ideologue lost, and a conservative democrat won the republican district. The author of this article attributes the loss to a misunderstanding of local politics by movement leaders. He also comments on two gubernatorial races and how these indicate a national political mood in terms of the new president.
17. Max Blumenthal reports extensively on movement conservatives in his recently published book Republican Gomorrah, which outlines a Frommian scenario of complicated movement figures with shady histories against the back drop of Fromm’s famous text Escape from Freedom. While the work demonstrates a systemic party logic movement conservatives captured along with the republican nomenclature, it cannot suffice as an explanation of any new authoritarianism, or defending society via common political subjects. Kevin Phillips properly demonstrates a more sound and systemic explanation of theocracy and republicanism in his text American Theocracy.
18. The title of Richard Hofstadter’s mid-1960s article comprehending the angry mind of political behavior, The Paranoid Style of American Politics, seems to hold its weight.
19. Appearance, see: Giorgio Agamben, “Special Being,” in Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007) pp. 56-57.
20. Samuel Weber has rehabilitated “communicability” into “impartibility.” See Samuel Weber, Benjamin’s -abilities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2008). Walter Benjamin noted Karl Kraus’s depiction of newspapers create an “atrophy of experience.” How such atrophy developed in the last century and the consequences for political activity are poignant for eschatological experiences in media. One could extend atrophy beyond newspapers, of which the news industry itself is in serious decline. See: Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003) p. 316.
21. Benjamin’s obscuring storyteller became a novel-device of revelation. See: Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nicolai Leskov,” in Selected Writings, Volume 3, 1935-1938 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002) section XIV, p.155.
22. Information’s value “does not survive the moment in which it was new.” Information surrenders to presence “without losing any time.” In contrast, the story of natural history is a surplus that “preserves and concentrates its energy over time.” Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” p. 148 Yet by “revelation” returning to the image in solitude with the device, the eschatological reveals within aspects of reflection. Agamben, “Special Being,” p. 57.
23. In the device we write as a novelist would and “take to the extreme that which is incommensurable in the representation of human existence.” Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” p. 146 Information is something which requires only that it be understandable it itself. Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” p. 147.
24. Erfahrung, long-term experience bound in tradition, and Erlebnis, isolated, momentary experience, work through Gedächtnis and Erinnerung. Gedächtnis is primarily recalling unconscious data; Erinnerung a recall of more individualistic memories. Considering transmission and listening, in light of retention and activity, perhaps Benjamin’s Erfahrung, and Gedächtnis: experience and memory, provide a clue. Erfahrung “condensed . . . experience over time,” is analogous to apparatuses. Erlebnis, momentary, isolated experience; pertinent to reflecting upon images. Erfahrungen, built by Erlebnissen, are respectively, work and activity.
25. See footnote 7 of “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940.
26. Image is “not a substance but an accident . . . found in a mirror, not as in a place, but as in a subject . . . it does not possess a continuous reality.” Agamben, “Special Being,” pp. 55-56.
27. Agamben’s translation of species from his essay “Special Being” in Profanations. Eidos relates to being substantiated in captured images opposed to the insubstantial not captured. “In philosophical terminology species was used to translate the Greek eidos.” Agamben, “Special Being,” pp. 56-57.
28. Religion removes “things, places, animals, or people from common use” that “transport them to a separate sphere. Every separation contains or conserves in itself a genuine religious nucleus” (Agamben, What is an Apparatus? p. 18). This difference occurs for Agamben via Foucault who “demonstrated how, in a disciplinary society, apparatuses aim to create…docile, yet free, bodies that assume their identity and their ‘freedom’ as subjects in the very process of desubjectification” (ibid., p. 19).
29. Species is a part of subjectification read with Agamben’s definition of apparatus: “a machine that produces subjectifications, and only as such is it also a machine of governance. Capitalism and other modern forms of power seem to generalize and push to the extreme the processes of separation that define religion.” Concurringly Benjamin notes the novel’s mass proliferation rises with the middle class. One can extend this proliferation to cellular phones and personal computers novel devices. Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” Section VI.
30. The term derives from Latin “signifying ‘to look,’ ‘to see,'” it root extends through spectrum (image, ghost). Agamben, “Special Being,” pp. 56-57.
31. OED def. of aspection: action of looking at, beholding.
32. Agamben, “Special Being,” p. 56.
33. Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” p. 155.
34. The crystal pure elimination of the ineffable in language is read with Agamben’s Special Being and also presages Benjamin’s delineation of the storyteller from living efficacy into appearance. See Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin (Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 79-81.
35. See: Giorgio Agamben, “The Idea of Language,” in Potentialities, p. 47.
36. Benjamin’s “perpetuation of remembrance” I adapt as a n index of species. Remembrance, Eingedenken, is the “muse-derived element of the novel” added to “recollection,” Gedächtnis, “the muse-derived element of the story,” who share a “unity of their origin in memory” that disappears with the decline of the epic Embedding and consequent concealment of the memory muse is a transmittable structure of being in severance that forces memory into mere appearance. Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” p. 154, Benjamin’s early writing on form and content in terms of retention and activity are poignant. He describes how content is accumulated by the withdrawal of form. See Walter Benjamin, “The Currently Effective Messianic Elements,” in Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1996), p. 213.
37. Benjamin’s “image” of both the moral and external world had “changed.” Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” p. 143.
38. Agamben, “Special Being,” p. 58.
39. See Mark J. Penn and E. Kinney Zalensne, Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes (New York and Boston: Twelve, 2007), p. xvi.
40. Agamben, “Special Being,” p. 59.
41. Such was presaged Samuel Weber’s insights in a collection of essays titled Targets of Opportunity. Weber notes the OED definition of target shares its meaning with shield.
42. Weber, Benjamin’s -abilities, pp. 38-39.
43. Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” p. 160.
44. Ibid., p. 161.
45. Ibid., p. 157.
46. Ibid., p. 156, and Agamben, What is an Apparatus? pp. 13, 17.
47. The insubstantial form without “a proper place” could be the potential story that, according to Agamben “occurs in a subject . . . like a habitus or a mode of being . . . like the image in the mirror.” Agamben, “Special Being,” p. 57.
48. Benjamin’s quote: “The dialectical image is an occurrence of ball lightning that runs across the whole horizon of the past. Articulating the past historically means recognizing those elements of the past which come together in the constellation of a single moment. The dialectical image can be defined as the involuntary memory of redeemed humanity.” See Walter Benjamin, “Paralimpomena to ‘On the Concept of History’,” in Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940, “New Theses B” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003), p. 403.
49. Knowledge is the experience of the moment historically, within that moment of the dialectical image; the past becomes part of our involuntary memory (ibid., p. 403).
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid., pp. 405-7.
52. Benjamin’s “the project of discovering ‘laws’ . . . the course of historical events is not the only means—and hardly the most subtle—of assimilating historiography to natural science.” The political eschaton is not a historian, whose task, Benjamin notes “is to make the past present.” This historian is “guilty of the same fraudulence” of replacing language and its faculty of death into a predetermined field of memory. Ibid., p. 401.
53. “Only when the course of historical events runs through the historian’s hands smoothly, like a thread, can one speak of progress.” Ibid., p. 403.
54. Ibid., pp. 4012, XVIIa.
