Blogging the Arcades Project (pt. 2)

One thing I think we set out to do with the blog posts was a more standard summary of the week's readings. This would take what we'd agreed to read and give us a few ideas of what we took from that reading, points of discussion, as well as act as evidence of the reading, a summary of it, a reference point to return to, an encapsulation of major themes and an overall snapshot that used the mandate to actually articulate in one's own words what was read as a spur to both comprehension and original thinking. Now, what's happening with these posts could be seen as a bit different. These have been close readings that do, at various points, much of what I've just mentioned, but that have veered essentially toward one or more blog posts devoted to each individual passage, unpacking as many nuances and layers of meaning as possible in an act of ongoing notation and an attempt to enter into a kind of dialogue with the unstated and indirect intentions imagined to be behind the text. But I want to say, isn't this later modality of response in fact the true summary of what Benjamin is attempting to convey in the Arcades Project? As I've pointed out in a couple posts, the book is in the last analysis experiential, attempting to create an experience of reading that steps outside of linear summary or, so to speak, traditional footholds for discussion. By this measure then the presentation of the reading experience that is achieved through posts like these, these confrontation with the text, is a response that the book calls for and is finally an appropriate summary of the week's activity. Our question might then become, what about the concluding paper for the independent study? What form should it take?