7 - Constellating Chartist poetry: Gerald Massey, Walter Benjamin and the uses of messianism

Summary

Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history – blasting a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the lifework.

In his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Walter Benjamin enjoined Marxist critics to ‘constellate’ rather than ‘tell’ history, by bringing a threatened past into a meaningful relationship with an equally endangered present. This chapter is both excursus and exemplum of the Benjaminian method in that it seeks to constellate the work of the Chartist poet, Gerald Massey, with that of Benjamin himself. It will demonstrate that Massey's messianic vision of history anticipates many aspects of Benjamin's own messianism. Both, for example, will be shown to turn on the opposition between the ‘homogeneous, empty time’ of capitalist modernity and the charged potentiality of Jetztzeit (‘the time of the now’).