m4,2, pt. 2 (method of the sandwich man)

Trying to determine a method for the Arcades Project is like trying to determine a method for a great work of literature. Specifically in this sense, such a task is peculiarly irrational. Methodology is by definition informational reading. We cannot one-sidedly buy into the quantification of experience and language. But a large question here is exactly whether the reading of a passage like this is in fact "purely" literary, which would for example come under the rubric of storytelling. Part of what Benjamin is doing here is exhibiting different modalities of reading, asking the question of whether all types of reading we are doing, including informational, are literary readings, and then vice versa. What kind of reading are we doing of this passage, what kind of reading are we doing of the sandwich boards? As in m3a,5 the truly explosive, sensate reading is the informational, this is where true liberation takes place. We can see the sandwich board as informational. But here to the extent that the dreamy, idling flaneur is encased in his work, in the work of informational text, a cipher for the industrial labor process, to that extent he continues to survive as a flaneur, just as with a poet in the court of the middle ages, to that extent does idleness exist at all. Our take away here, at least in part, must be that methodology can exist but only insofar as it doubles as its opposite, which is perhaps subjective space, the space of desire, emotion, symbolic language that works to dismiss the goals of methodological activity.