Mechanized lifespan

H1,1: The convolute starts with an extraordinary image or scene that seems to tie together, not unlike the mechanical turk at the start of "Theses on History," many of Benjamin's concerns. The "here" in the first sentence is the arcades, and immediately the idea of "material" from the epigraphs is deeply problematized, the scene moving from birth to death, from "infant prodigies" to the "old woman" and finally "Doctor Miracle" (a stand-in for death itself) with a crisscrossing of the technological and the human. Those infants are in fact collectibles, mechanical curios first presented as the forefront of technology at a "world exhibition" but for which the arcades now serve as a "last refuge," their use value never coming to be, or having disappeared: why would a briefcase need to have an interior light? nothing a meter long will fit in a pocket, and so on. These births are no more than abortions, "broken-down matter," monstrous and "degenerate" creatures. We should note here as well the role of books, which run parallel to these failed and useless technologies in that they universally (hence they can just be tied in a bundle) "tell of all sorts of failure." Books here are analogous to buttons, bringing together fabric (social, ideational) with a kind of "mother-of-pearl" false purity, dubbed "de fantasie" or simply pure delusional dream. Progressing on, there is then a display of old-world superficiality, old world technology, with even a gas lamp, mirroring the light inside the briefcase, from which abortive technologies are born, and it's this light by which reading takes place, and this is the light of the collector (we perhaps think of Benjamin in the Bibliotheque Nationale, burrowing around for quotations in old tomes). And here it is that the objects in the collection, again these are citations, are revealed as teeth, removed from any use value, a mouth, but clearly human, some genuine, gold, perhaps with monetary value, others false, wax, finally all broken, refuse of a kind. Finally all returning to again a useless, mechanical yet recognizably human automated doll, constructed by something that appears to be a saving miracle but that's a harbinger of death. We also note with this passage that is not a citation and therefore has the status of commentary, something Benjamin wrote. But even so it's in an allegorical mode that feels to some degree like objective history but in fact feels much more like narrative fiction.