Consciousness of what was previously said

Again and again in the Arcades Project a citation jumps firmly in front of what commentary has 'moments before' finished summarizing. There's probably little way for us to know but it's almost as if Benjamin built an argument in a more traditional way, using citations as evidence, then flipped them around in the final text. Again, we can't quite know, but the final impression is undoubtedly one of the citations themselves authoring the book, stepping in with some sort of authority to complete an argument, just that of course the actual authors of the quotes would have had no idea what argument they were completing. What are the implications of this kind of textual consciousness, which gets to the heart of the Arcades Project, at the level of form and content at once, simultaneously? We could say that istorical time is called into question. If the past is completing the arguments of the present, then we have a situation where we cannot decisively say that the present takes priority or is more significant than what has already been said or done. Linear or chronological history makes no sense in this context, or, that is, makes sense for quite different reasons than some essentialist notion of historical progress. Furthermore, any text, any passage, becomes citational to its core, which may indeed be a core of nothingness. A citation, we could call it an 'active citation' if in fact it has quotes around it, is an authorship equally as much (and one cannot say this emphatically enough) as any supposed individual penning of words and phrases. This is where the glittering nature of the Arcades Project originates, since it's impossible to say where and how any of it actually exists. I keep bringing this up, but we are in the position of the "angel of history," "turned toward the past" and "fixedly contemplating" a "pile of debris" that is this massive text, perceiving a "chain of events" where we would "like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed," but aware that it's all one "single catastrophe." (Note how this passage describes a reading practice, placing our very ideas about how we approach reading into a historical continuum, something with material outcomes.)