Convolute N as intervalic

N1,3. This reads very much like a personal note for a longer work, with its "say something," though it's not clear how much that matters in terms of the Arcades Project being seen as a complete work if we consider notes to have the status of a deviation from the main line of argument, just like a citation. Why wouldn't Benjamin simply include them and leave it at that? If something appears ancillary, that is not a detraction but only enhances the overall effect. And that effect? This passage sets out to describe its method, and it's one designed around an "intensity of the project." We see the reference to "time," which picks up from the previous passage N1,3, and the central use of citation, but see here something that I've suspected all along, that in fact into each "specific moment in time"—and we understand here each data point of citation—is packed a multiplicity of forces, and not just a multiplicity, but in fact "everything one is thinking." We should note here that Benjamin says "at all costs" this material, everything one is thinking, must be "incorporated." Insofar as the Arcades Project is about an intensity, about that lightening strike, this is where it comes from. Now, as much of a mind fuck as this scenario already is, we then go on to compound it with another aspect of the project we've already considered, suspecting it to be a work behind the selection and arrangement of citations. And we can note here that as much as Benjamin wants to refer to natural forces, rather than human-inflected, as the guiding force of his own project, he also posits a teleology that in fact encompasses not only the citational project itself but, and this perhaps precisely because the project is citational, his very thought processes even before he commits them to language. In this passage he defines the Arcades Project as being contained with his thoughts from "the very beginning," the Arcades Project as a kind of genetic match to thought itself. Now, based on these ideas, Benjamin then moves to a description of the less citational and more contemplative Convolute N, which attempts to record or jot down the thinking process that happens "between" or in the intervals of citational copying (perhaps not unlike my own urge to write my way through reading the Arcades Project, through availing myself and making use of the matching digital textual affordances of the blog). He is attempting to "preserve these intervals of reflection" because they represent thought processes that bear the telos of the overall project. Convolute N can be seen as a documentation of Benjamin's thought processes as they occurred to him in the intervals of selecting citations, even as he states yet again, right here, that those citations are "the most essential parts of this work" (and not Convolute N, which so many, like me right now, gravitate toward in their analyses), even as he confirms how important citations are in being "turned most intensively to the outside." I'll conclude here by saying, again, that as extraordinary as this passage is, the citations themselves are even more so.