One thing that stands out to me is the balance – or, really, the explicit lack of balance – between Benjamin’s “reflections” and citations (his original or synthesizing thoughts versus his quotations.)

I think the reason why this interests me returns to the tensions in the translator’s preface between Forschung and Darstellung, or research and application: there is, despite the fact that the project remained unfinished, some desire still remains to treat this more as a composition than a commonplace book. In the translators’ view, the quotations outweighing the commentaries makes this text distinctive from Benjamin’s other use of the montage, and they suggest at least the possibility of reading “this ostensible patchwork as, de facto, a determinate literary form, one that has effectively constructed itself” (xi).

I’m a bit resistant to this logic; it almost seems to confuse organization with composition. (Is Milton’s commonplace book a new literary form in the same way – having both quotations and reflections, though primarily quotations — or is it a private form of record-keeping? If Milton had been more interested in the montage in his explicitly literary pursuits, would that change the answer?) Of course, if the Arcades is an archive, in a way this answers (or at least sidesteps) the question: it organizes and revises for the sake of information management. “Why revise for a notebook?” (xi) Well, for no reason, if a notebook is just meant to be a short-term memory aid or a brainstorming technique – but if it’s meant to be a reference, even if just for one individual’s use, organization and clarification seem like a normal approach.

Clearly the intent (and, orthogonal to the intent, the actual purpose or usefulness to external readers) of the convolutes was what stuck with me, and I found myself interested in the proportion of reflections to citations; this might have been in large part due to the typographic distinction, which I was interested to learn didn’t come from Benjamin himself but from the German editor. I was interested in the English version’s preservation of these distinctions as well as curious about Tiedemann’s logic in deciding when a passage contained enough of Benjamin’s own analysis to become distinct from a quotation: there is some principle which makes [O3a,1] a reflection and [O7a, 1] a citation, and I am not sure what that is, although I wonder if in at least some cases the language of notation is the deciding factor.

Whatever the reason for my interest, I found that the ratios changed from section to section: I at first thought that section X, [Marx], was particularly dependent on pure quotation with not much ‘original’ reflection, and wondered whether this was due to the topic at hand or to the section being late in the book and therefore possibly less developed. (The sections thin out and are in fact often missing toward the end of the book, and I reasoned that the next step after a very thinned-out section might be a section with significant quotations but fewer original thoughts, positioned firmly within the realm of preliminary research.)

Then I wondered whether I was imagining the difference in general; J [Baudelaire] and N [On The Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress] both seem to have significantly more of Benjamin’s own thoughts (in J it seems about even across the long section, while N is predominantly Benjamin’s thoughts). But P, [The Streets of Paris], seems to lean almost as heavily in the direction of quotations as X — though interestingly it did take me until the second read-through to notice this, and I’m not sure what to make of that experience. Why did the ratio strike me as off for X where a similar one didn’t for P? Another way of asking that question might be: was this a trick of my reading order (or my Marxist-saturated brain), or is there something about the subject of P that makes the sheer process of collecting and juxtaposing citations intuitively read (to me at least) as more…analytical, creative, compositional, a work-in-itself?

Of course, it may be a combination of all of these: because The Arcades Project is in the particular unfinished state it’s in, we can never be sure whether eventual work on the project would have smoothed out these differences or whether certain sections would have maintained noticeably different ratios. And even that statement preserves the idea of it as an archive rather than a draft or a literary text: I’m thinking about the possibility of Benjamin “completing” it by doing more work along this method or by signposting his information management in a clearer way, rather than by overwriting and displacing whatever we have here the moment he wrote “a syllable of the actual text” (xi, emphasis mine.)