Gambling alone

On Some Motifs in Baudelaire Illuminations Walter Benjamin 

VIII and IX

In the first part we develop further the idea of walking in a crowd and how to be part of this crowd requires adaptations rending a person a robot. Although there doesn't seem to be a paranoia of a mastermind--this all seems to happened collectively.

Then in the next part gambling is discussed which seems abrupt as previously the idea of walking in a crowd was gradually developed but now isn't mentioned. What might be the case is we are no longer conceptualizing walking but are now in the process of doing so and the first thing we are aware of besides a nebulous mob are people playing games of chance.

Like ambling, gambling is described in the guise of mechanized labor extracted from our capacity to experience things. The games rely on impulsive behavior such as flipping a card and since the game is surrounded by chance there is little incentive to remember much more than the hand currently dealt.  

But just as we conceive gambling as this artless pastime, Benjamin sees glimmers of myth in it's lure. The gestures of flipping a card may not grounded in meaning of any sort but once one puts this activity to the unconscious it can be associated with all sorts of things like shooting stars.