Benjamin described his work as a “Copernican revolution” in the practice of history writing. His aim was to destroy the mythic immediacy of the present, not by inserting it into a cultural continuum that affirms the presenct as its culmination, but by discovering that constellation of historical origins which has the power to explode history’s “continuum.”In the era of industrial culture, consciousness exists in a mythic, dream state, against which historical knowledge is the only antidote. But the particular kind of historical knowledge that is needed to free the present from myth is not easily uncovered. Discarded and forgotten, it lies buried within surviving culture, remaining invisible precisely because it was of so little use to those in power.

Benjamin”s “Copernican revolution” completely strips “history” of its legitimating, ideological function. But if history is abandoned as a conceptual structure that deceptively transfigures the present, its cultural contents are redeemed as the source of historical knowledge that alone can place the present into the question. Benjamin makes us aware that the transmission of culture (high and low), which is central to this rescue operation, is a political act of the highest import―not because culture in itself has the power to change the given, but because historical memory affects decisively the collective, political will for change. Indeed, it is its only nourishment.