m3a,4 (commentary is intentional)

"Phantasmagoria is the intentional correlate of immediate experience.  [m3a,4]"

Immediate experience is here unintentional, with the intentional "version" of it being phantasmagoria, the moving images projected by lanterns in an early cinematic experience. We intentionally, and mechanically, produce the "corollary" of what is otherwise the transcendent experience of idleness and leisure. The passage here is saying something like: the leisure we find in the spectatorship of watching film is the mass produced version, echo of, mirror image of, a natural occurrence of what's being discussed as "immediate experience," even as that experience traces its roots back to a primitive version of leisure that was entirely class-based.

We can look at this passage and realize as well, and given how the Arcades Project operates it seems justified to do so, that Benjamin wanted to make this point and did so in "his own words." Couldn't he have found a citation that indicated as much? Perhaps, but what we're faced with is the fact that this particular text, this statement, does not have that status. It comes to us as "commentary." We should probably have a special understanding, which might arise from convolute N, a special status for such text in this book. One thing we could say is that, to use the language of this passage, the commentary is "intentional," a word that in the Trauerspiel book indicates that something is removed from truth. So that we very much have the "correlate" of the creation of a phantasmagoria and the use of commentary, the use of text that is not sectioned off as citation, which even as it is text might be seen as a more natural version of immediate experience.

Here too since this statement is made in the mode of intentional commentary, there is something of the character of the paradoxical statement "I always lie," statements that internally dismantle their own meaning. Throughout, Benjamin seems to present this aspect of language itself, or this phenomena of language use, and this is perhaps the universal quality of language. Here we can say that pure language is nothing more than the motion toward being pure, since at any point, with any word, if we look closely we uncover both its impurity, at the same time as its purity and further impurity. Again, if anything we can say the Arcades Project is characterized by an alternation between citation and commentary, both passage by passage and internal to many of the passages, but this distinction atrophies and is poisoned in the same manner that the distinction between leisure and idleness is, or between phantasmagoria and immediate experience.

Benjamin seems to want to question his very impulse to "say something," which yes he sees as fully functioning behind the selection of citations, but in this way that's permissible since the citations are internally deconstructive as much as anything else.