Tiedemann's Benjamin

Looking at Rolf Tiedemann's "Dialectics at a Standstill," included in the back matter of the Harvard  edition of the Arcades Project, Tiedemann in some ways downplays the book by saying it's "nothing less than a materialist philosophy of the history of the nineteenth century." Indeed what Benjamin was creating was a book of humanity, not simply a version of history, as we've seen again and again a "magic encyclopedia." Tiedemann then goes on to promulgate the notion that the exposé "provides us with a summary" of the Arcades Project, when the meaning and intent of the book is everywhere critical of that very informational notion of "summary," and we know that Benjamin only wrote the exposé out of necessity in a various funding and publication contexts. That second paragraph of Tiedemann's essay then seems to lose focus, finally getting lost in truisms and clichés about the greatness of the work, how miniature models exist within it, what Adorno might have said, and so on. Finally Tiedemann commits a huge error by prioritizing, in a wholly academic manner, the "Work of Art" and the "On the Concept of History" essays, saying that the "countless" notes of the Arcades Project "rarely go theoretically beyond positions that have been formulated more radically" in those essays: but as is abundantly clear, the Arcades Project is not concerned with taking positions, and its mode of writing is completely different from those other essays. Now, Tiedemann is one of Benjamin's primary interpreters, interlocutors, commentators, translators, so that we could look at what effect these systemic misperceptions must have had and be having on the reception of Benjamin's work.