m2,1, pt. 2 (object of study)

Here Benjamin adds in to the collection of experiences the idea that while idleness and work combine to make up total experience, itself based in war, this combination can be characterized as an act of study, the "prototype" for the whole constellation. And the object of study? "The fundamentally unfinishable collection of things worth knowing" that we can flatly say must be a reference to the Arcades Project itself. This is a point at which we can characterize our own reading of this book as accessing, through a kind of scholarship, experiences of work and idleness that are grounded in physical combat, violence, and slaughter, a womb-like identity and nation-forming merger with technology. Here our idleness, so to speak, can represent to us a mirroring that is going on with the Arcades Project where the arcades form the object of study for Benjamin, though at another level their form and function also characterize his subjective makeup; Benjamin then creates the text of his book, the Arcades Project, which as pure text then become for us as readers our object of study, immersed within our own version of total experience, and, as the text relates, it is a book that at another level of form and function characterizes our own subjective makeup. The material "text" of the nineteenth century arcades always already constitutes how we comprehend our own subjectivity, and at these various levels of crossing from text to material, past to present, object to subject, we maintain our status both as workers and dreamers.