Primitive version of the arcade

A2a,7: Here the quote is so much aligned with Benjamin's theory of history that we can hypothesize that Benjamin is accessing certain commonalities between himself and Muret. For instance, Muret seems to be both objectively relate but also to emphasize the dark, earthy, primitive character of the early shopping gallery, as well as the two defining poles of activity, the milliner and the book trade. Hat-making invokes the fashionable element and its operative role in the function of commerce, with books and everything in them, text itself, just another hat, each milliner on this chair, face out, another author on display. Just to be clear: we can't possibly imagine that one of Muret's themes was to compare milleners to authors, hats to books (though one hypothesis here is that it was in the back of his mind, and by extension in the minds of the shopkeepers and strollers, an early 19th-century meme). Also of note, chronological progression is in play here in that Benjamin first lists the later incarnation of the arcades in A2a,6, then the earlier in A2a7. We can see by the page numbers in the bibliographic information listed for Muret that this reverses his own ordering, reverses the progress of his history. This raises the idea that most all of the histories Benjamin would have relied on would have been in chronological order, and this ordering is echoed in the strict progression of page numbers, part of the organizing structure of the book (as a kind of Platonic category).