Deadlock

What are we learning by close reading? One thing that is perhaps happening is that we're coming to a place of a much clearer vision of how exactly Benjamin is dismantling dominant forms of scholarly, historical, or research discourse. We can say, "wasn't the Arcades Project written so long ago, in the 1930s, and haven't we clearly surpassed anything that might have been said, now quite close to a century later?" I honestly don't know. But when I pick up a recent book of scholarship I'm seeing many of the issues Benjamin seems to raise. For instance, the book Writing of the Formless: José Lezama Lima and the End of Time (2017), by Jaime Rodríguez Matos, and the following passage: 

"But it now seems that in fact modernity, and not any possible redemption or liberation from its political and economic deadlocks, is itself a mixed temporality that is constantly battling between a circular and a linear time—a linear time of alienation and a circular teleological time of redemption. The two need to be taken together, even in the very (im)possibility of such a synthesis. And this would mean that modernity is no longer the other of the revolutionary interruption of empty chronological time; rather, these are two sides of a single coin." 

Now, the passage seems clear enough, and we've certainly seen variants of modern temporality discussed in the Arcades Project, particularly of the more linear or traditional version. But I think we can also learn quite clearly from the Arcades Project how the concept of linear time is embedded in and perpetuated by linear discourse itself, so that we have the spectacle here of the prose speaking of a revolutionary temporal experience but all the while re-inscribing the very linear version of experience that was so deeply problematic to begin with. Language is used in this book, and in virtually all scholarly work, informationally, linearly, non-recursively in a way that moves point to point precisely like linear time. How could we ever absorb the subject matter the passage is in fact referring to if with every word, phrase, sentence, chapter, book, series of books, and so on, we are rehearsing over and over the non-liberation, the non-redemption of political and economic deadlock? Indeed by seeing how Benjamin treats historical discourse and knowledge in the Arcades Project it becomes clear how these habits of discursivity and the communication of knowledge continue to be subjected to forces that run counter to things like the nature of modernity and so on.