From the perspective of the allegorical, the instantaneous transformation within the symbolic becomes a natural history slowed to such an extreme that every sign appears frozen and—seemingly loosened from every other relationship—arbitrary. The concrete corporeality of the written script exemplifies this allegorical emphasis upon things. Allegory is not the conventional representation of some expression, as misunderstood by later critics, but an expression of convention [Ausdruck der Konvention] (OGT, 185). Allegorical expression includes as its object this very conventionality of the historical, this appearance of insignificance and indifference. That is, convention itself comes to be signified or expressed. What Benjamin rediscovers in the allegorical is, then, something akin to the concept of the expressionless, as the torso of a symbol, introduced in the essay on Goethe. Benjamin argues that this predominance of the allegorical viewpoint in the 17th century baroque finds it most dramatic expression in the mourning-play, and that consequently the Idea of the mourning-play must be grasped via the allegorical.