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.