Here Benjamin explores Paris as the 'capital' of the nineteenth century. While for Lukacs, the socially resonant or typical was to be found in culture's immersion into the great dramatic forces, events and individuals of their time, Benjamin works with the seemingly inconsequential, the marginal, the humble and unnoticed material. Thus Benjamin is able to engage much more productively than Lukacs, with popular culture and everyday experiences. Benjamin discusses the trash, kitsch, waste and remaindered material of the past. Leslie gives a very lucid account of how, for Benjamin, there is an affinity between allegory and modernity.
Allegory articulates the fragmentary experience of life under conditions of commodity fetishism.
But at the same time, it may offer a critique of this experience by establishing, in a flash, connections between things in which we intuit the social relations of the epoch. It is here for example, in the world expositions, where technology, culture and capital coincide in a utopian vision that equates industrialisation with progress and technological rationality with reason itself. For it contains within it wish-images that are authentically connected to a collective fantasy. The point is that all the prosperity and plenty which the 'bountiful usages of new technologies' promise, cannot be realised within the social relations of production. It is not so much a question of awakening from the dream, but making the dream come true.