This deferral was also, in part, the result of a process of maturation—a kind of ripening—immanent to the work itself. The Arcades was a vast and ambitious project, not simply in terms of the mass and breadth of its archival sources (sought out by Benjamin in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris), but also—indeed, primarily—with respect to its philosophical and historical intent, and the methodological and representational challenges it posed. Its sprawling, yet minutely investigated historical object was to act as the point of entry into the philosophically comprehended experience of metropolitan capitalism—not some past experience, or the experience of a past phase of capitalist development, but the experience of the capitalist metropolis in Benjamin’s own day—through the construction of a specific series of relations between its elements ‘then’ and ‘now’. The practice of research, conceptual organization and presentation that it involved was self-consciously conceived as a working model for a new, philosophically oriented, materialist historiography with political intent. Its final, fragmentary and ‘ruined’ status has come to stand not simply as the sign of a failure of completion, but as a paradigm of a form of constitutive incompletion that is characteristic of all systematically oriented knowledge under the conditions of modernity. In this respect, in its very failure to be actualized, it confirmed the fundamental historical and philosophical truth of Benjamin’s earlier analysis of the Romantic fragment—extending the genre in a hitherto unimagined way.