Gradations of idleness and experience

The idleness convolute seems in each passage to detail the gradations of idleness in any given experience, with elements of work and idleness in each. Thus m2a,2 talks about how idleness can be seen as a work-preparedness required for reading news or nightlife, or, that is, two social institutions where idleness forms an integral part of their functioning. Perhaps we could never see the flaneur as part of any institution, but here that is exactly what is going on, even if at a very abstract level. The next passage, m2a,3, illustrates how idleness in fact works to produce the news, with "waiting around" that finally produces informational content, as well as photographs. The "get ready" and "shoot" paralleling the intervalic hunting done by the student, the reading practices Benjamin himself engaged in while constructing the Arcades Project.

m2a,5 accentuates the theme of how one experience may appear to be the same as a different experience to an "outsider," or how work experience may appear to be immediate experience, when it really isn't. The question here is what distinguishes the two, with the passage picking up from m2a,3 and saying that work or long experience has "continuity, a sequence," like "get ready" being followed by "shoot" in the creation of news. Here however this continuity forms a substrate out of which immediate experience arises, giving the appearance that something like idleness is just that, and not something that in fact has "behind" it a whole series of events that are work-related (take that to the boss!). Seen closely and for what they are, there is a transparency of work into idleness and vice versa, both relying on the same material on which to base experience. All this accounts for the disappearance of idleness into work in bourgeois society.