Double vision

N1,2. In terms of citational practice, here we have the slight deviation between what we can understand as standard research or scholarly practice, historiography, and what Benjamin is doing with citation and his reading of identical sources as those traditional research might draw on. It is an extremely slight, almost imperceptible, shift, both sets of researchers going in very similar directions, though the difference constitutes an entire reorientation of the textual object. And yes, given what we just read in N1,1, we can understand this difference as a difference in how text is understood, again very slight, the two things having almost the same name in fact, one being a kind of invisible seeing through of the other. What Benjamin is opting to do is follow the magnetic North Pole, a more natural framework, a directional leaning that appears to be an error to anyone looking for the humanistically developed geographic north. It appears to be a "deviation," just as a citation appears to be a sidestep, an indirection, a moving away from the main course of an argument. Benjamin here very squarely places citation at the heart of his entire practice, announcing that his "course" is determined in this way, that he is following citational "data," not having it follow him, with some other imagined goal. Citation is the guiding force, even as it appears counterintuitive to "others." Finally we also have here the "differential of time," by which is meant most obviously the difference between the present tense discursive act of continuous argument and the necessarily differentially oriented timestamp of a citation, especially a citation from an older book. In a work oriented around a "main line of inquiry" a citation is a break in the narrative or argument, a deviation (to use the term in the passage here), one that must be corrected and recovered from, just like a ship that mistakenly and momentarily follows a compass oriented toward the magnetic north pole and not the geographic. Here what Benjamin is saying is that he makes his argument through those very deviations, his line of inquiry progressing through what others might see as a being lost, and that in fact his "reckoning," his final making sense and achievement of the goal of his voyage, his arrival, is made by following these citational "detours" but also by a consideration of the difference between that "time" of the citational and the time implied by the quite similar, though crucially distinct, traditional forms of knowledge creation.