Scholarship and the Chicago Cubs

You're tasked with writing about Benjamin. You've delved in to Benjamin's work exclusively for seemingly a long time. Now you want to look at the criticism. But it feels odd: not unlike prioritizing the reading of Shakespeare criticism over reading Shakespeare's text itself. There's clearly no comparison whatsoever. The criticism feels like, is, a completely misleading waste of time. This is perhaps a founding moment of all criticism, all scholarship, this inauthentically secondary quality. The quality of taking one away or removing oneself from the experience of the object. But just like with so much in the Arcades Project, we have to look at how things become their opposites, how they build up to a transformation. One way of speaking of this is to look at how much the Arcades Project fits into a written response, a critical response, not unlike the scholarship that's built up around it. Even the inauthentically secondary has a place in establishing the nature of the Arcades Project. Certainly the criticism is all quotable material, such that if Benjamin were still alive he would no doubt make use of it (just as he did with other criticisms). That folding in of whatever happens to be current, that nonrejection of any element as itself a dialectical image, containing a potentiality of the now of recognizability, and this is a political move, to the extent of defining the political itself. Yes, the most elemental thing to do is to stay with a generalized sense of text, building in pieces of critique as "needed" or as they come to one, but staying with that discourse that text itself is generating. The fact is we could have done an independent study on one passage of the Arcades Project. It would have lead out to everything else that was happening in the book. Saying this, it's important to recognize that work done on the Arcades Project must either confidently exceed the Arcades Project in insight, or work assiduously to follow it, to try to walk behind in its footsteps, which itself is very likely sufficient to exceed 95% of the existing writing on the Arcades Project. Criticism has not absorbed this work. To write through the Arcades Project is precisely to "believe the absurd," as in Y8a,1. And that is the point of any academic project whatsoever, to find that place in what you are doing that can be seen in no way other than pursuing the incomprehensible, the silly, the mad, the futile. The decision point at which one "turns back" and tries to reinterpret one's findings in terms of dissatisfying existing discursive practices is always already caught in an empty history. The not at all unrelated moment we have recently witnessed: the Chicago Cubs, cursed as the most unmagical, losingest team in baseball, wins the World Series after a 108 year drought. That team is now transformed into the most magical team baseball will perhaps ever know. It's not the team or the place or the cause that's significant; it's perception and how experience is created. You believe that thing until you work through it, to its basic transformation, which might not be in your lifetime (how many players for the "cause" of the Cubs are no longer living, but of course who live in baseball history through this victory?). All this being said, if in fact this translating back into more traditional discourse keeps a central significance, then yes this process of figuring out and performing that transformation is key.