Spirit/material equivalence and the status of text

At the deepest levels of the Benjaminian conception or worldview there is an equivalence between cognitive energy and material objects or architectures. You can see individual or communal action, how the decisions are made, being determined by certain physicalities, like the fortifications in I1a,8. Once you assume this equivalence a structurally materialist conception of the world takes hold: all things are determined by this equivalence and hence financed, industrial power structures preside over any given manifestation of human endeavor, from the shape of cities, to decoration on furniture, to belief structures, to the shape and content of books. With this last there's no doubt that Benjamin saw his own work, in particular the Arcades Project, in this context, and we could say it might be all the more true since much of his other writing was done for pay, to survive, and necessarily commercial, even if on a small scale. Finally, much of what I've been blogging has been circling around how in fact the Arcades Project works to interrogate its own materiality, from its use of citation down to its own status as a textual entity at all. In fact, if we're going to talk about citational practice the discussion should probably center on how citation engages a materialist worldview (though in many ways that's exactly what we've been doing).