Are we the machines that never read? (Y1,4, pt. 2)

Reading is a kind of unifying idea in the Arcades Project. One reads the book, one reads the material, as much as Benjamin wrote it out or copied it down through writing. One comes back to again and again with each passage that one is reading, that that's one's activity, and one is constructing a consciousness in this act, in this immaterially determined approach, one that requires a kind of work precisely within the idleness required to actually read. And the constant parallel of reading through the passages with walking through the passages of the arcades, with the activity of the flaneur, with a movement that works dialectically with the uncovering of static realities as in Y1,4, a non-reading, non-linguistic experience of the image, of the material itself and the machine that of course never reads. We are constantly asking, are we those machines that never read, that read "only" informationally? And reading is at stake throughout by virtue of the simple fact that Benjmain is reading the texts he cites, bringing forth as pure information, as informationally as he can as an exclusive extension of the now of recognizability, by virtue of their effectiveness as dialectical images that contain an abyss.

Generalizations on reading and writing (Y1,4, pt. 1)

The passage reads as straightforward commentary yet is packed with contraries. It's evidence of Benjamin's ability to speak from a place of seemingly perfect contraries, contradictory meanings that take place simultaneously through and through. Does he "construct" that "phenomena" or is he reflecting an aspect of language itself, of history? One could argue that even that question is contained in the prose. Need I write about of how these contraries function or operate? Would that help us get to a better understanding? It would get to more of an illustration of how text is working in the Arcades Project, how Benjamin seems to be constructing meaning, what he means, what the text means. 

I would need to do 94 of these analyses to get through Convolute Y. What do I have time for? The biggest issue in Benjamin scholarship seems to be that the Arcades Project is not being read in detail. What would I have to offer, in what context? Certianly anything I have to say derives from uncovering certain tenets in the close readings, incontrovertible ways Benjamin seems to be handling certain themes, where when one emerges into the secondary literature a more nuanced sense of these themes seems to be absent. Can we take that as a value? The readings themselves might not resolve into a work, yet there seem to be points at which they enter conversationally into a network of things being said, and they do so with reason. So in some way those things being said are central to the work of close reading as a work. "From the start, to keep this thought in view and to weigh its constructive value." The necessasrily too diffuse, too formative hermeneutical readings that come through writing about that reading, that fill space and arrive unpredictably.

Scenic effects (Y1,3)

French fairy plays again national in character, these are dramas as in Y1,2, mechanical scenic effects, phantasmagoria, drawing on myth, "in vogue" and hence part of fashion. They are situated in historical time, developmental, an aspect about them that is reviewing time past, citational in that sense. There is an aspect of these dramas that is "tailored," like an article of clothing. Sense of technology following the dictates of fashion, sense of photography being part and parcel of the revue, an illusionistic performance, a mechanically induced drama. 

How do we make sense of the passage as a citation? Benjamin is documenting a point in the evolution of theatrical spectacle, placing photography within that lineage, placing technology itself in a broader context side by side with nationalism, the Second Empire, bourgeios entertainment, the progress of capital. He does this citationally almost as if saying "as if we could be outside of this movement." 

Photography's scenic effects. Again though the status of the passage as text: it is identical to one of the plays, to language reaching its dramatic moment of exposure, technologically inflected. It speaks of being "retrospective" at the same time as it is retrospective. It tells its own history, but at a remove, which is its own drama, the distancing that brings one closer, that indirection. The material nature of reality, materially presented, like the excess of informational content, leads to the explosive force of liberation. Text only ever seeks that liberation. We need to let the insights already contained in the text come to the fore. There is an aspect to the world that already contains what we are attempting to say.

A completed Arcades Project

Many state that the Arcades Project is incomplete, that it is a collection of notes and was meant to be, as with the Beaudlaire material, extensively revised by Benjamin as he constructed the finished work, which presumably would have far less citation and consist mostly, if not entirely, of commentary. But as much as it seems, even with all of the conjecture, quite difficult to confirm that this was the case, we can say that many of the passages can productively be read as complete in themselves. That is, they contain citations and commentary that could be said to be serving quite identifiable functions, to be indicating quite specific ideas and theories (no matter how difficult they are to get to the bottom of, an investigative process that in fact often seems to be the very point of a passage), and that there is more often than not a word or two, a sentence or two, a whole passage that does hold the status of the commentary so many seem to be looking for. Thus there is a type of more or less dispersed completion to the Arcades Project, though it does not come in the large doses we might be used to. We very much seem to have completed passages, hundreds of them.

Reading: In Benjamin's employ (Y1,2, pt. 5)

To pull this text apart one engages a reading on multiple levels, and we can perhaps begin to categorize these levels, since at least one of them seems to occur with each passage: the self-referential, where the explication of one thing, most often done through the medium of citation, functions as cipher for an explication of Benjamin's process in the Arcades Project itself. Here in Y1,2 we can note immediately that the Scribe is Benjmain himself, and our reading is meant to always have these implications firmly in front of us, implicating Benjamin and the Arcades Project quite fundamentally in the "industrialization in literature." The citational practice enlisted in the Arcades Project is precisely a "getting others to work for us," a way of outsourcing writing in the same way that Scribe outsources the creation of elements of dramatic text. Except that in Benjamin's case the outsourcing runs unconsciously, so to speak, to the already published authors of books, to the unsuspecting creators of the history of the nineteenth century, even as he is outsourcing the very description of this process to the author of this citation, Kressig. Benjamin does indeed see his scribal activity, his copying, as a photographic process, another copying that also has a negative element, this time in language itself. Such that the team of dramatic writers are akin to a team of photgraphers, each creating their own version of a mechanically produced "presentation": and we know that Benjamin's conception of language had everything to do with presentation, as seen in the work on Goethe's Elective Affinities:

Mystery in the dramatic is that moment in which the latter overshoots the realm of its own language towards a higher and unattainable one. It can therefore no longer be expressed in words but only through presentation: it is "dramatic" in the strictest sense.