These passages, from the concluding sections of One-Way Street and the ‘Surrealism’ essay, respectively, convey something of the ecstatic character of Benjamin’s political thought at the outset of the 1930s, in which technology appears on a political knife-edge between its possibilities as “a fetish of doom” and “a key to happiness” (SW 2, 321). Art—an art of the masses—appears within this scenario as the educative mechanism through which the body of the collective can begin to appropriate its own technological potential.