Curious division between citation and commentary

The use of bold type in the Arcades Project as published in English by Harvard University Press seems utterly random. Look at Y6a,4 (not bold) vs. Y6a,6 (bold): there is effectively an equal amount of commentary and citation in each, both being primarily citation. It's as if the editors were well aware of how tenuous the distinction between commentary and citation was, knew that it absolutely didn't matter, and scattered the formatting to make the point. But indeed it's a reading of the book, a window into the editorial apparatus that's been applied to the work that is the Arcades Project. It is an intervention into Benjamin's text, which according to any interpretation he meticulously planned. The editors drape their conception of what is and is not a citation all through the book, giving the impression of a clear-cut oscillation. 

As we can see in the translator's foreword, the bold text derives from the German edition of the Arcades Project, where a larger typeface was used to designate "Benjamin's reflections in German", or, the commentary, and a smaller typeface "for his numerous citations in French and German." Again, "the larger type was used for entries containing significant commentary by Benjamin." Thus Rolf Tiedemann, the editor of the German edition, must have either introduced or at least approved of this technique of visually assigning one role or the other to certain pieces of text. The translators of the current edition, while they note that all this is "without textual basis in Benjamin's manuscript" (!), go ahead and maintain the technique, only now using the bold text rather than text of larger or smaller size to divide up commentary and citation, assigning bold to "citation." 

They say that using bold avoids the "hierarchical implication" of "privileging" "Benjamin's reflections over his citations," but in fact that's not the entire issue: as one can see in the text itself, the issue is distinguishing commentary and citation at all. Now, I don't want to say that the translators have no sense of how commentary and citation merge, but they do allow this massive formal element of the book as published to go forward, not only misleading readers into thinking that commentary and citation are distinct but not, as I've mentioned above, doing a very good job of it! 

To be fair, the translators state that "what Benjamin seems to have conceived was a dialectical relation—a formal and thematic interfusion of citation and commentary." This is quite true, but given this why let stand the deeply misleading use of bold for "citations," if in their dialectical relation to commentary they become by definition indistinguishable from commentary? The word they use, "seem," is troublingly tentative. Moreover, they then again tentatively reference J75,2 as a way to draw out or expand what they mean by this interfusion, and we look at that passage to find a Fourierist characterization of work not as inauthentically exploitative but as a form of children’s' game play: "all places [read both citation and commentary] are worked by human hands, made useful and beautiful thereby; all, however, stand, like a roadside inn, open to all." Here, the "act would be kin to the dream," not separated from it, as in inauthentic labor. The passage itself is in the mode of commentary (and not in bold), though in fact it is a citation of Fourier and Baudelaire (the last unacknowledged, as the translator's point out). The passage itself is thus an illustration of exactly the problem of working (an inauthentic labor), and asking the reader to work, to bring an inauthentic distinction between citation and commentary across the whole of the Arcades Project. 

We are left with the impression throughout the Arcades Project of a misperception or misunderstanding by the translators and editors of the very thing that is the defining characteristic of the entire project. More than anything I'd like this post to indicate an inaccuracy that seems to be circulating at the heart of scholarship around the Arcades Project and by extension Benjamin's work as a whole.