Relation between commodity and allegory: ‘value,’ as the natural burning-glass of semblance in history, outshines ‘meaning.’ Its luster <Schein> is more difficult to dispel. It is, moreover, the very newest. In the Baroque age, the fetish character of the commodity was still relatively undeveloped. And the commodity had not yet so deeply engraved its stigma—the proletarianization of the producers—on the process of production. Allegorical perception could thus constitute a style in the seventeenth century, in a way that it no longer could in the nineteenth. Baudelaire as allegorist was entirely isolated. He sought to recall the experience of the commodity an allegorical experience. In this, he was doomed to founder, and it became clear that the relentlessness of his initiative was exceeded by the relentlessness of reality. Hence a strain in his work that feels pathological or sadistic only because it missed out on reality—though just by a hair. [J67,2]
Baudelaire’s destructive impulse is nowhere concerned with the abolition of what falls to it. This is reflected in his allegory and is the condition of its regressive tendency. On the other hand, allegory has to do, precisely in its destructive furor, with dispelling the illusion that proceeds from all “given order;’ whether of art or of life: the illusion of totality or of organic wholeness which transfigures that order and makes it seem endurable. And this is the progressive tendency of allegory. [J57,3]
(all citations from Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, M.A. and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999).