m3,2, pt. 3 (self-referentiality)

We can point out that this citation operates on yet another level, much like other citations in Benjamin, where it effectively describes the nature of citation itself, how citation is operating in the Arcades Project. As a whole the Arcades Project attempts to be encyclopedic, a "magic encyclopedia" is an idea that comes up often, so that when we read "all religious, metaphysical, historical ideas" we immediately think of the book in our hands. To the degree that this book is about citation, and as we can see from things like convolute N it is radically so, then citation is what we take these first few words of the passage to refer to. So that "in the last analysis" (which I think we might be at in our analysis of this citation?), this citation defines citation as a "preparation," but one that is derivative of what has happened in the past, these "great experiences." In this passage a preparation is equated with a re-presentation. I'm not quite sure what we might be preparing for, but it's clear that "all" of history, "all" ideas are preperational, perhaps in just the way leisure seems to be preparation for idleness, or long experience a preparation for immediate experience. In any case we can watch here how the analysis, the self-interrogation, of citation seems to work its way out of and then back into the overall structure of ideas and meanings already at play (perhaps idle) in the convolute. The nature of history is that it is citational, so that it makes sense to have thinking about the nature of citation be a thinking about the nature of history. Relevant to all of this is N7a,1: "every dialectically presented historical circumstance polarizes itself and becomes a force field in which the confrontation between its fore-history and after-history is played out."