m2a,5

This passage exhibits the construction of leisure through the "matrices" of "socially important types of behavior," which we might see as work experience: religious contemplation and court life (or governmental representation). (We could invoke here Burke's "terministic screens.") Finally the work of the poet, of literature, of language is situated in this same matrix, serving to reinforce power structures within which leisure plays a part. The poet experiences leisure in this context alone. He is at the mercy of the court. Thus to distinguish idleness or leisure here is to place it in relation to these alternate "force fields" that might otherwise seem, or announce themselves as, completely separate. It is from here that we move toward bourgeois society, where idleness replaces leisure for the poet and becomes almost a matter of subtle appearances, though we can assume it maintains the same relational function vis a vis larger social forces. We can note here as well that this evolution of leisure into idleness is immediately picked up in m3,1, where rather than do something like openly play a role in the church or at court, idleness, or the poet as incarnation of idleness, looks to sever any sort of tie to work experience, to bury that particular substrate entirely, placing a weighty accent on immediate experience (to refer back to the language of m2a,4). And here for Benjamin this separation extends to a separation from the labor process as a whole, producing an almost pure idleness, though this is a situation as mentioned in m1,1 where we perhaps revert to a primitive "denigration of the tradesman" or "business affairs" overall, a bias which was shown to be part of the etymological constitution of language itself.