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.