"Backward facing" citations

I1a,7: The 1928 quote from Giedion is extraordinary for its almost too perfect summation of both the preceding citations and the commentary, almost as if that earlier material had been constructed around it, or as if it had given birth to these other things. The context is one of galleries or art, with an intimate "fear of one's own magnitude" closing the passage. Industry interfuses art, or is present alongside it, with the "noise of machinery" that fills the galleries (arcades in themselves). Then we have the slow evolution of cultures of technology like transportation, with guests arriving "in a coach-and-eight" even as the place is filled with the sound of motors, and the attempt to, as in I1a,4, obscure through ornamentation like furniture the actual dimensions and overwhelming, or inhuman, aspect of the scene. Again this is published in 1928, about an exhibition that takes place in 1867 (it's actually not clear if it takes place in Paris), and its textual description of the galleries lines up with Benjamin's thematic or apparent thesis so perfectly, it seems to prove his point so thoroughly, that its status as a citation, as documentation of a history that is necessarily outside of the present, is called into question, begins to waver, making language appear as with Bassajet the "Images dites à portes et à fenêtres," or a spoken image of a door or window, a magic threshold onto something not quite clear. We can note further that this puts a few things into the same category as ornamentation and its functions: text, whatever text conveys, history, the historical impulse. What could we be said to be seeing with any of these? In the true interior, perhaps of the psyche, text holds the place of a "furniture-like installation"—again taking on the nature of art—used to "prettify these . . . galleries and to relieve the austerity of their design." Here the allegorical nature of the passage begins to take root, especially as we note the parallel existence of these galleries and rooms and arcades and shops in themselves. A dialectic at a standstill at this point of interpretation reflects the undecidablity between whether the text is the interior we are looking for or is the point beyond which, the covering, historically determined, beyond which we cannot go.