Tiedemann's Benjamin

Looking at Rolf Tiedemann's "Dialectics at a Standstill," included in the back matter of the Harvard  edition of the Arcades Project, Tiedemann in some ways downplays the book by saying it's "nothing less than a materialist philosophy of the history of the nineteenth century." Indeed what Benjamin was creating was a book of humanity, not simply a version of history, as we've seen again and again a "magic encyclopedia." Tiedemann then goes on to promulgate the notion that the exposé "provides us with a summary" of the Arcades Project, when the meaning and intent of the book is everywhere critical of that very informational notion of "summary," and we know that Benjamin only wrote the exposé out of necessity in a various funding and publication contexts. That second paragraph of Tiedemann's essay then seems to lose focus, finally getting lost in truisms and clichés about the greatness of the work, how miniature models exist within it, what Adorno might have said, and so on. Finally Tiedemann commits a huge error by prioritizing, in a wholly academic manner, the "Work of Art" and the "On the Concept of History" essays, saying that the "countless" notes of the Arcades Project "rarely go theoretically beyond positions that have been formulated more radically" in those essays: but as is abundantly clear, the Arcades Project is not concerned with taking positions, and its mode of writing is completely different from those other essays. Now, Tiedemann is one of Benjamin's primary interpreters, interlocutors, commentators, translators, so that we could look at what effect these systemic misperceptions must have had and be having on the reception of Benjamin's work.

P1,1 (textual city)

Convolute P discusses the city, specifically the streets of Paris, as a linguistic construct. As with P1,1, the "life of the city's layout" is not only compared with but described as "no less important" than the "unconquerable power" of names of places and structures. And the power of these names persists "in the face of all topographic displacement," meaning that even after a place or structure has been destroyed or renamed, the power of their former names, of their presences, can be seen to continue. Thus multiple places, multiple cities, exist in or beneath the city as we know it, the one that appears, in a model of how the past inhabits the present, via forces that "never stop moving." This is how the city operates—and this is how language operates—there being little ability to tell which, the city or language, is inspiring or leading the other. In a passage such as this we can go back to Benjamin's Origin of German Tragic Drama for the importance of the act of naming, of names or words themselves. As Benjamin writes there:

Truth is not an intent which realizes itself in empirical reality. The state of being, beyond all phenomenality, to which alone this power belongs, is that of the name. This determines the manner in which ideas are given. But they are not so much given in a primordial language as in a primordial form of perception, in which words possess their own nobility as names, unimpaired by cognitive meaning. (pg. 36)

Here "this power" indicates that which is able to realize itself in empirical reality, which is what the city streets represent. The city streets are part of "phenomenality," but this passage makes clear that the name, words, language and the way it functions, are what determines the shape of that phenomenality we know as the city, as materiality in general. The depth of the overlap of linguistic structure with empirical reality is also a theme in Benjamin's One-Way Street, written contemporaneously with Origin. As Michael W. Jennings writes in his introduction to that volume, "subliminal connections between textual passages are complimented by overt thematic and formal echoes and rhymes," and these rhymes are incarnated in the city streets, where "the streets of Paris / Were set to rhyme" (epigraph to convolute P).

But indeed in P1,1, there are a number of ways in which things, names, appear and reappear or resurface, echo and rhyme, streets appearing through other streets, names and meanings appearing through other names and meanings. In this way, we are given three main versions of "topographic displacement." The earliest glimpses of the city and language are described as "little theaters" from the anciene regime of Louis Philippe, when the temple was the operative structure. These structures are torn down but resurface in a physically different location, but with the same purpose, theater, and names. Here "to speak of 'city districts' is odious to me" makes sense, since a district would confine a certain activity to a certain geographic location, which clearly contradicts how the city operates in a kind of cycle of rebirth that is not topographically specific. (We can quickly note that the refrain "to speak of" here and at the start of this passage emphasizes how the city is defined through language.) The second form of displacement is one where a street or property continues to be named for someone who died long ago, or some feature or use that has long since disappeared. This is a kind of haunting or ghostly presence about the city that specifically attaches to language, the resurfacing being far less physical than a structure reappearing in a different place. Again Benjamin places these earlier uses in a feudal context of the "landed proprietor" with a "demesne," so that, particularly as a part of language, it's not clear that the ownership has not continued to have material influence. Finally, a third type of displacement relates purely to the spread of contemporary forms of meaning, where as soon as an idea takes prominence (or a restaurant become popular) that particular name or form of understanding spreads out across the linguistic landscape, like a meme, and becomes part of general usage. Construction and naming of a restaurant that is, so to speak, part of a chain accounts for both physical and linguistic movement.

These three versions of "topographic displacement" are part of this passage, which itself works to linguistically characterize the linguistic nature of the physical space of the city, of how city streets function. "Such is the movement of the streets, the movement of names." But we can productively look here as well at the concluding moment of the passage, which seems to raise a new issue: "which [meaning streets and names individually and in relations to each other] often run at cross-purposes to one another." The "cross-purposes" are indeed what the passage has been indicating, the way in which meaning may not correspond, at least in appearance, with the "empirical reality" we are presented with, names typically indicating people or things that have disappeared or that originate elsewhere. However, with this last moment, last phrase in the passage, we also have a vision of city street criss-crossing one another, moving in opposing directions, mapping over the landscape in a back and forth frenzy of commotion, movement that never stop, the city that never sleeps. What I've been describing thus far have been elements of this movement, but in fact the point is along the lines of a frenetic simultaneity that characterizes the phenomena of language and the city as a whole (as well as the Arcades Project itself).

Off-site Methodology in the Arcades Project

"'Empathy' comes into being through a déclic, a kind of gearing action. With it, the inner life derives a pendant to the element of shock in sense perception. (Empathy is a synchronization, in the intimate sense.) [m4,4]" (from convolute m [Idleness], The Arcades Project, by Walter Benjamin, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999)

What follows is commentary on the above citation.

"Empathy"

Empathy is defined in standard dictionaries as "the ability to understand and share the feelings of another," and is derived from the Greek empatheia, or em-"in" plus patheia-"feeling." Its key role for the flaneur can be seen in passages like M17a,2[1]: "Empathy with the commodity is fundamentally empathy with exchange value itself. The flaneur is the virtuoso of this empathy." And Benjamin writes of the "intoxication of empathy" experienced by the flaneur. As we can see immediately however, there is a double and triple edge to Benjamin's use of the word, to his concept of empathy. We need first of all to make clear that, in general usage, "empathy" in many ways defines what is human about humanity itself. It does this by indicating our ability to sympathize with others, to have compassion and care for others. It indicates a basic ability we have to remove ourselves from our solipsistic universe and acknowledge the genuine presence of another. In a sense it gives birth to this other, in an action of sheer self-displacement. In this way it forms a constitutive element of citational reading, since to foreground another's voice or text is to take on the engagement of that text by as much as possible giving place to another existence. Hence in this way empathy plays a foundational role in reading. All this being said, we can now acknowledge that the empathy Benjamin is referring to is the ability to transport oneself into the being of the nonhuman, even the antihuman, the commodity, and then more abstractly with "exchange value itself." And the "itself" is important, since it indicates a kind of essential or irreducible existence of exchange value, an existence that rivals the force or singularity of empathy itself. They seem to merge beyond recognition. And there is the flaneur, the "virtuoso" of this merger, bringing to it all of the entrapments of "artistic production" (m4a,4). Thus empathy, emotion, these are human traits, but only in the sense that they bring the mechanical to actuality. They do seem to function as they have perhaps in more artisanal or pre-industrial times, but only as a reference to their former selves, their former lives, the ideas that informed their places and placement within language (and I will return to the citational nature of the first word of this passage, empathy being within quotes).

Coming into being

We can next look at the idea of the "coming into being" of empathy. The notion takes up the idea of divine incarnation from the immediately preceding passage, where the idler is characterized as a nearly priestly figure, as mysterious as the god of the holy trinity, except that in this case we have the triune presence of the flaneur, the gambler, and the student (the theme of this trinity repeated in a number of passages in this convolute). This is a lighthearted moment but it works to continue the theme of the interfusion of a sort of medieval framework of holiness alongside the penetration or reorientation of that framework by secular concerns, by labor, by the machine. Here we have the first appearance of this "type of idler" among highly privileged, if not courtly, classes of the late eighteenth century, the "jeunesse dorée" (gilded youth). We can see then that the Christ-like coming into being of empathy carries with it in m4,4 implications not only of a religious framework for understanding of such an advent, but precisely a kind of New Testament or revolutionary merger of disparate elements such as God and man, spirit and flesh, idleness and work, emotion and machine, storytelling and information (to use categories dear to the CMCI introductory modules!). Thus we can say that the modern idea of empathy is rehearsing or reinscribing medieval, if not primitive, epistemologies and linguistic practices. Empathy is being treated by bourgeois society as its savior, but in fact we consistently have the spectacle of its co-optation by capital, though within a secularized religious framework of understanding. We could take note here how our fundamental conception of emotion and of the workings of capital are derived from Judeo-Christian beliefs and practices.

Déclic

The "déclic" characterizes that through which empathy is incarnated or comes into being. It is in fact a mechanical sound or "click," a trigger, that happens when mechanical objects or parts fall into place or suddenly begin working together, in unison. In the phrase "avoir le déclic" it also indicates intellectual insight itself, or, more scientifically, "having a brain wave." The word functions here as an onomatopoeia, an aspect of language that fits well in the context of this passage and the Arcades Project overall given the merger of the machinic with abstract meaning. Pronunciation of the word actively performs the reference to the mechanical function, one that as we've seen is the functional reality of abstract meaning. The concept also echoes the notion, to quote convolute N, of the "image flashing up in the now of its recognizabilty," a central idea running through the Arcades Project, so that here we have an obvious alignment between that "now" and the coming into being of empathy. To quickly summarize: empathy, which the flaneur is the virtuoso of, comes into being through the flash that defines the dialectical image, through the now of recognizability, through the déclic, which happens to be a word taken from the realm of mechanics but that has also come to characterize a key element of human experience or knowledge, the insight or epiphany.

A kind of gearing action

Déclic is also defined immediately after it is used, defined by Benjamin in the passage itself, as "a kind of gearing action." We can note with this idea then that empathy relates to divergent parts of a complex machine coming into simultaneous use, turning on all at once to form a unified whole. This is a framework that again references the preceding passage with the idler coming to be only as a combination of the separate entities of the flaneur, the gambler, and the student, pendants (to anticipate a word later in this passage) of the father, the son, and the holy ghost. These are the cogs or gears that when working in a well-oiled manner experience a déclic and bring empathy into the world, as the world's savior, humanity then being saved exclusively by virtue of the perfect operation of the non-human or the technological. Again, this coordination of the human and the technological is a refined version of the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions, forming a phenomenological or experiential contemporary persona in the flaneur but one who strictly adheres to primitive and medieval epistemes. We can also say that this "gearing into action," particularly as it related to habits of mind, can be seen as the way in which a reading of the Arcades Project itself takes place, where ideas that are indirectly referred to through the operation of citation and commentary come to the surface, link up, and produce empathetic readings precisely aligned with the one I am now constructing in this commentary. Thus we are empathizing with the machine of the text reading works toward a déclic that reinscribes a kind of textual idyll, but one that shores up the utter domination, indeed the perpetual defining out of existence, of the human by the commodity.

The inner life derives

With it, with the déclic, which even as it has been shown to give birth to empathy remains a term for an externality, a mechanical sound, Benjamin then declares that "the inner life derives" a pendant. Here we have a confirmation of the metaphysical implications behind "déclic" with "inner life," but then added into this is the concept of derivation. Here the inner life is the active force, which uses the déclic to "derive" the pendant. Of course "derive" has a number of meanings, nearly all of which might be seen as relevant in this context. I'll say first of all that the act of deriving is part of the reading experience, as I've discussed it above, and is a basic aspect of interpretation, here reflected in all its material consequences. But derive also indicates the following:

·      to obtain something from: there is an act of exchange in process of empathy, in the reading process

·      base a concept on a logical extension or modification of: this aspect of derivation is relevant when we think of the derivation of contemporary forms of empathy or idleness from their feudal iterations

·      of a word, have as a root or origin: this returns us to the structural nature of language, where we have, from m1,1, things like the derivation of "negotium" from "otium," such that contradictory concepts share the same root entities within language

·      mathematics: obtain a function or equation from another by a sequence of logical steps. This sense of the word emphasizes its roots in logic, and thereby mechanics.

We can also note the late Middle English origin meaning "draw a fluid through or into a channel," which is a complementary movement to that of feeling's moving away from one in empathy (again "in-feeling"). But there is a kind of triple movement here, from the subjective surface of empathy and inner life, into the more logical sense of derivation as a mechanical extension, then to the level at which this logical movement is subjectively motivated.

A pendant

What is derived by inner life through the déclic is a "pendant," which definitionally expands the passage on multiple levels while also echoing and thereby reinforcing aspects of the sense of "derives." Most notably, a pendant, though I don't think this is its operative meaning in the passage, is a piece of jewelry, which places the discussion here back in the context of fashion, which was thoroughly covered in convolute B. Elements that are extensions of something else, as with the ornamentation of fashion, or architectural ornamentation, are almost universally seen and treated as central throughout the Arcades Project, which of course is effectively nothing else but a collection of passages and texts that are pendant to, derived from, the arcades, in both their real material and structural manifestation and their allegorical and ideational presence. But here the more prominent meaning must be, and this picks up from the conceptual version of "derives," a pendant as an "artistic, literary, or musical, composition intended to match or complement another." So that here we have inner life deriving (which again is a drawing downward, as with a liquid) what appears to be a material object of feminine dress but that is a conceptual entity related to empathy and the "now of recognizability." Once again we have language manifesting on a level of material and mechanical function, as well as at exactly that place where those functions have a mental or ideational parallel that itself for all intents and purposes is etymologically inherent to the meaning of the words themselves, such that finally Benjamin in some sense can be said to be, as with the more surface level citations, drawing himself away from his own individuality or intentionality in writing what comes across as commentary.

Element of shock

What the pendant hangs or is derived from is the "element of shock," an idea covered in detail in, among other works, Benjamin's essay "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire." In that essay, shock is a formative element of everyday experience, one that works against and disrupts consciousness, which, as with recollection, "aims at giving us the time for organizing the reception of stimuli." Again, "the greater the share of the shock factor in particular impressions, the more constantly consciousness has to be alert as a screen against stimuli." As shock increases, so consciousness must behave differently. Shocks are thereby the organizing principle of modern mass consciousness that the flaneur, wandering through the crowd, as much as the worker, navigates. Benjamin continues in this essay to position shock within a conception of idleness: "The shock experience which the passer-by has in the crowd corresponds to what the worker 'experiences' at his machine. . . . a process whereby the reflecting mechanism which the machine sets off in the workman can be studied closely, as in a mirror, in the idler." Shock is determinative of the experience of both the worker and the idler, as mirror images of each other. It operates at a between place, a place of double meaning and multiple uses, but effectively being a mechanical action, not unlike the déclic, through which subjective experience such as empathy takes root. What we have in m4,4 is a more or less straightforward presentation of shock, but we can note that this complex term is used within the framework of a number of other complexities, such that in the passage we're given a network of expanding and unfolding meaning that itself perhaps creates a contrast to or background for that singular notion of the déclic or shock itself. This is an important dynamic here and I'll rephrase slightly: we should explore the situation of Benjamin's writing where shock forms a central concept in his discursive writing, such as the Baudelaire essay. The idea is introduced in a straightforward manner. In contrast, in this passage in the Arcades Project, what appears to be the identical notion is used within a framework of figurative or literary reading, so that as much as any other term or idea in the passage reflects multiple symbolic or allegorical meanings, so does the idea of shock, such that it is necessarily and radically destabilized. In a substantive sense, we must take up these implications of the Arcades Project in a reading back through Benjamin's other writings.

In sense perception

The shock appears "in sense perception," and we can return to m3a,5 for a clear contextualization of how we should understand sense, or sensation, at this point in the Arcades Project. Once more we have what could be said to be a complex notion introduced into the reading of this passage, m4,4. Contrary to what we might expect, it is information, work experience, industrial labor, otherwise thought to be dehumanizing, that contains and gives rise to the "explosive force . . . liberated in sensation." This particular shock is in fact the re-valuation of all values, where "whatever still resembles wisdom, oral tradition, or the epic side of truth," in sum the ideas of artisanal labor and storytelling, are "razed to the ground," becoming the ruin that features so prominently elsewhere in Benjamin's work. Sensation and sense are the indications of this final apocalyptic process, one that is as much as empathy itself born out of a mechanical process, a world consumed by information and the machine. What's in part extraordinary here as well is that empathy is "post-déclic," appearing after the domination  of informational communication, the "gears" coming into action, such that inner life, emotional life, empathy, and by extension the modes of reading that correspond to these things, the human as we know it, are in fact produced by mechanical processes, their apogee, that "now of recognizability."

Empathy

It is here in this passage that we have the word "empathy" appearing once more, this time without quotation marks, clearly noncitational, as opposed to its first appearance at the start of the passage. The passage could be said to have "razed to the ground" the citational status of the word's first appearance, attacking and negating empathy's supposed separation from mechanical or informational processes, turning it back into non-citational commentary. Thus like the operation of many passages in the Arcades Project, this time in microcosm, there is "reading through" key concepts that start out either as citaitonal or commentary and reversing that status, inverting it, until all value, all certainties, are destabilized, in process again much like the "shattering of long experience" in m3,3. A type of "loss of all meaning with a determined content," to paraphrase m3,3, what is left being a kind of shell or ruin. And as with other passages in the Arcades Project, the mis en abyme does not stop there, but could in fact be said to continue in this passage, with this gutting of the traditional meaning of empathy by using the word as commentary and non-citationality itself being further contextualized within what appears to be the subtle punctuational phatasmagoria of m3a,5, with the parenthesis within which the non-quoted "empathy" appears again referencing the use, in m3a,5, to indicate the citational center or heart of that passage, an informational moment in the text that can again be seen as another shock or liberatory explosion within informationl and industrial modes of communication.

Synchronization

Finally with this passage we arrive at what might be its heart, an indicator of the true implications of much of what is going on in the Arcades Project with mechanical text processes, the industrial, and the solipsistic nature of commodity culture. This is the word "synchronization," which as note 11 points out translates also as "alignment," a "term used by the Nazis as a euphemism for the elimination of undesirable persons from public and professional life," such that empathy, insofar as it is incarnated through déclic and indicates a mechanical falling into place of gears (and there is little rational to be found in the Arcades Project for defining empathy as anything else), is a prime mover for not only fascist but genocidal culture, where the more empathy is prioritized the more severe is the disappearance of the redemptive human value that empathy might otherwise suggest. It is an extraordinary paradox, one that summarizes perhaps large portions of the tradition of cultural critique since Benjamin's time. And here it is as well that we can point out, or revisit, that as with that first definition of empathy as "in-feeling" or the placing oneself outside of oneself, a phenomena that runs in exact parallel to the reading process as it functions within a citational work, where one is constantly going back to removing oneself from the text at hand and imagining alternative contexts for what one is reading, there is a powerful self-implication, of the Arcades Project by the Arcades Project, in an informational or reading process that is implicated at every turn in the destruction of the Jewish people, of which Benjamin himself was a part, in a vicious, if not suicidal, cycle of meaning turning in on itself. It is often said that feeling is the thing that saves us, saves the soul, from mechanized society. Here Benjamin illustrates how feeling is itself the thing that propels that destructive version of human life, how the template of salvation and belief in the soul is not only extrapolated into the world of machines but in fact originates and returns there.

m4,4 as passage

If we take all of the foregoing together and look at the implications of the whole as a passage in the Arcades Project, how that passage works, how meaning flows into and out of the language, we have to acknowledge it as an instance of the relationship between citation and commentary, that all of the foregoing, any analysis we come up with in relation to this passage, must itself be part of the arcades. But is that statement accurate? Not really. For instance, we can start with the arcades themselves. What we mean when we say "arcades" is quite obviously two things: of course the physically existent shopping centers from the nineteenth century; of course the book itself, the Arcades Project. What are these two entities? The actual arcades have long ago disappeared, yet only in an evolutionary sense, where the forces that led to their creation, survival, and decay have gone on in other forms, such as the department store, and then other modalities of consumption, of the integration of the commodity into bourgeois life. And as we can see throughout the Arcades Project, any of our ideas of the physical instantiation of the arcades, their literal material existence, are governed by fully immaterial ideas and concepts, such that mental architectures are consistently given just as much substance as, so to speak, brick and mortar. The two things, material and immaterial, go to the heart of our idea of the arcades, to the point at which the literally existing arcades can be said to transform or turn into the Arcades Project itself, to the point at which the certitude of their existence is subsumed by, shown to be neither more nor less than, a textual entity, and finally the operation of text and language itself is shown to have at its core a flaneur-like dream of appearance and disappearance. There is the appearance of substance, and there is the substance of appearance, and each thing looked at long enough transforms into its supposed opposite, just like idleness and work.

The passage, m4,4, is part of the arcades. Again, what does that mean? Again, we can also understand the passage as being part of the book the Arcades Project, which in fact is the far more explicitly textual manifestation of the physical entity. No matter what any of the passages in the Arcades Project say they are, by virtue of being in this book, placed within the quite pronounced ebb and flow of linguistic meaning that defines the overall project. The book contains them all and is indeed a type of "encyclopedia" in this way. No matter how meaning operates or what kind of meaning we encounter here, it must finally be seen as text, as a passage in a much larger design and architecture and play of ideas. If method, or anything else, is discussed directly, it is only a form of "directness" within a larger project of indirectness. If something is exhibited, or cited, it is only a form of indirectness within a larger framework of directness, characterized by the mirroring of the book the Arcades Project as a structure of the physically existent arcades. This doubleness constitutes the depths of this project, we see it at every level. A case in point is the word "passage," which at once defines textual passages, of which the work consists, and a passage or hallway in the arcades, the German for the work being "Passegenwerk."  And indeed, what Benjamin defines again and again is the nature of these passages, each one forming another dialectical image, another entry point, another now of recognizability, another shock or sensation, an exteriority that in fact characterizes an "inner life" that "derives" from that exteriority like a "pendant." The ideas we are faced with come to us in a kind of solipsism, but one that arises from language itself, of which we consist, the ground of the dialectic. Again however we can note how this very solipsism is a topic of the Arcades Project, so that finally we are presented with a purely visual structural entity of text and blankness, passage (which might be either citation or commentary, the two options for text's surface manifestation) and interruption. Here too we note how interruption is often characterized as individual or immediate experience, interrupting informational flow or work experience, as much as the text illustrates the blending of these categories.

Readers and reading

Finally, given all of the above, how are we as readers to approach m4,4, the idleness convolute itself, or the whole of the Arcades Project? They come to us as a mirror of our very selves, a kind of speaking mirror in language that says that we ourselves are mirrors, that the language of which we consist is that of the materially determined universe, not at all our own, or the language of the book, or the arcades, or of the history of ideas or of humanity. As readers we are fully implicated and participatory in what this book tries to achieve, and it is only by our accepting that role that the Arcades Project reveals its content and offers itself up for what it is. It is a book that insists on this type of reading at every turn, such that its methodology is to be that speaking mirror. Its methodology is to insist on an embodied reconsideration of methodology itself, each reader becoming a master of method or not reading at all. And this reading is an imaginative reading, one that takes apart the text and puts it back together, one that watches what the text is doing until the ultimate version of the text becomes closer, if not clear, that moment at which it dismantles its own foundations, so what reading is left with is a vacuum of sorts, but one that has left behind it accumulations of ideas and conclusions that form a kind of refuse or record of one's passing, reading one's way into the future. The reading of the Arcades Project is entirely about what's left behind as what is not that reading of the Arcades Project, the phenomena of taking life itself as a monadalogical experience, as itself a dialectical image. The Arcades Project must in the end be as much about what is not its text, what is unsaid, as what is that text, or what is said. In all of these ways then a documented and written out close reading of the book is one that speaks directly to the book's methodology, since only that reading can leave to one side the abstract experience of passage and the construction of meaning through language that is at the heart of the Arcades Project.

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[1] All alphanumeric references are to other passages in the Arcades Project.

m4,2, pt. 2 (method of the sandwich man)

Trying to determine a method for the Arcades Project is like trying to determine a method for a great work of literature. Specifically in this sense, such a task is peculiarly irrational. Methodology is by definition informational reading. We cannot one-sidedly buy into the quantification of experience and language. But a large question here is exactly whether the reading of a passage like this is in fact "purely" literary, which would for example come under the rubric of storytelling. Part of what Benjamin is doing here is exhibiting different modalities of reading, asking the question of whether all types of reading we are doing, including informational, are literary readings, and then vice versa. What kind of reading are we doing of this passage, what kind of reading are we doing of the sandwich boards? As in m3a,5 the truly explosive, sensate reading is the informational, this is where true liberation takes place. We can see the sandwich board as informational. But here to the extent that the dreamy, idling flaneur is encased in his work, in the work of informational text, a cipher for the industrial labor process, to that extent he continues to survive as a flaneur, just as with a poet in the court of the middle ages, to that extent does idleness exist at all. Our take away here, at least in part, must be that methodology can exist but only insofar as it doubles as its opposite, which is perhaps subjective space, the space of desire, emotion, symbolic language that works to dismiss the goals of methodological activity.