Any person, any thing, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else. With this possibility, an annihilating but just verdict is pronounced on the profane world: it is characterized as a world in which the detail is of no great importance. Yet it will be unmistakingly apparent, especially to anyone familiar with the exegesis of allegorical texts, that all those signifying stage props, precisely by virtue of their pointing to something else, acquire a powerfulness that makes them appear incommensurable with profane things and which can raise them to a higher plane, indeed sanctify them. Through allegorical observation, then, the profane world is both elevated in rank and devalued. This religious dialectic of content has its formal correlative in the dialectic of convention and expression. For allegory is both of these—convention and expression—and they are inherently in conflict with each other. — Walter Benjamin, “The Antinomies of Allegorical Exegesis” (excerpted from the Trauerspiel), in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, eds. Michael W Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y Levin (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 175.