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.