Within this framework, three distinct strands of work (discussed in the next three sections) can be discerned: (1) investigation of the crisis of experience via the ‘crisis of the arts’ (SW  2, 212) through the interrelated terms of technology/technique [Technik], aura, reproducibility, and collectivity; (2) philosophical distillation of the formal structure of the experience of the new, and its historical and political contradictions, out of its social forms, and the examination of its relations to allegory and commodity-form; (3) construction of a new historiography and a new philosophical concept of history. The first may be traced through a linked series of essays of which ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’ (1929), ‘Little History of Photography’ (1931), ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility’ (1935–9) and ‘The Storyteller’ (1936) are the most important. The second is concentrated in readings of Baudelaire and related texts by Nietzsche and Blanqui. (The focusing-in on these three thinkers is a focusing-in on the relationship of capitalism to modernity in its purest, nihilistic form). The third is conjured from a reflective conjunction of Marx, Nietzsche and Surrealism. It takes methodological form in ‘Convolute N [On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress]’ in The Arcades Project and achieved its accidentally definitive presentation in Benjamin’s most frequently cited, but still fiercely interpretatively disputed text (Caygill 2004; Löwy 2005; Tiedemman 1989; Wohlfarth 1978): the fragments—known as theses—‘On the Concept of History’.