Benjamin took as one of the main ‘methodological objectives’ of his Arcades Project “to demonstrate a historical materialism which has annihilated within itself the idea of progress”, taking as its “founding concept… not progress but actualization”  (AP, [N2, 2], 460). He had both philosophical and political reasons for this. Philosophically, Benjamin saw the conventional idea of progress as projecting into the future a conception of time as ‘homogenous’ and ‘empty’ epitomized by the attempt of Ranke’s historicism to represent the past “the way it really was” (SW4, 395; 391). This is a conception of time based on the temporal continuity of past, present and future, ‘in’ which events occur and are understood as causally connected. It is naturalistic in so far as it acknowledges no fundamental temporal-ontological distinction between past, present and future time; it has no sense of time as the ongoing production of temporal differentiation. Time is differentiated solely by the differences between the events that occur within it. In particular, it fails to grasp that historical time (the time of human life) is constituted through such immanent differentiations, via the existential modes of memory, expectation and action. In this respect, there are affinities between Benjamin’s philosophy of time and Heidegger’s (Caygill, 1994).  