What we call progress is a storm that prevents attending to the past

Evidence

The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress is this storm. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 630

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: This is the Angel of History image Odell’s ‘manifest dismantling’ inverts — the counter-image to Manifest Destiny that anchors the whole chapter.
• XREF: The backward-gazing angel connects to Benjamin’s own essay, and to Odell’s larger case that attention to the past is how an alternative future gets built.

Related

• Progress is a storm that propels us into a future we face backward (similarity 0.92)