m3,2, pt. 1 (fore-history)

Enter onto the stage of the progress of the text, argument, and illustration, the citation of m3,2. It reads like an intertextual epigraph but it does a couple very obvious things: it picks up the idea of how historical constructs of experience (both work and immediate) assume different forms over time, seeming to affirm that idea, but it also puts forward a very clear notion of long experience, associated with work but also tied to ideas of tradition. The following passage, m3,3, picks up the notion of the "shattering of long experience" so it's clear there's a certain critique of the citation going on, but in many ways sections previous to this citation seem to have been already unpacking issues this citation raises (and it's hard to see how it would be placed in the convolute on idleness, since that isn't mentioned at all): every word can be seen to pick up a theme from what has already been discussed: "religion" picks up ideas of the soul from m1,1 and from m2a,5; "metaphysical" does something similar, here more obviously including the idea of the poet from m2a,5 (and the title of Dilthey's book refers to poetry); "historical" could be said to access the idea of the transformation of leisure into idleness that happens for instance with the move from feudalism to bourgeois society; then we have a peculiar exercise in temporal recursivity, which suits what Benjamin has been referring to, the "last" analysis being a "preparation" "derived" "from the . . . past," all of which is a "representation"; and of course this all picks up the discussion of "experience", but at this point in our reading of the convolute we'd notice right away that the multiple definitions of this word that have been used, work or long experience versus immediate experience, are not present in the citation (and again the title of Dilthey's book refers to experience). Again the citation reads as if Benjamin has been thoroughly unpacking it, proving its relevance and veracity, all along, with each passage in the convolute. Think back to convolute N where Benjamin writes: "Say something about the method of composition itself: how everything one is thinking at a specific moment in time must at all costs be incorporated into the project at hand." Again he writes "Assume that the intensity of the project is thereby attested, or that one's thoughts, from the very beginning, bear this project within them as their telos." What is happening in this passage is that the citation appears to "bear within it" the previous discussion such that it's hard to give one or the other, citation or commentary, priority, such that that distinction becomes as amorphous, subtle, culturally determined, and perhaps nearly pointless as the distinction between, among other things, leisure and idleness, or work experience and immediate experience.