Note on method

The pieces in Einbahnstrasse, however, are not images like the Platonic myths of the cave or the chariot. Rather, they are scribbled picture-puzzles, parabolic evocations of something that cannot be said in words. They do not want to stop conceptual thought so much as to shock through their enigmatic form and thereby get thought moving, because thought in its traditional conceptual form seems rigid, conventioanl, and outmoded. What cannot be proved in the customary style and yet is compelling - that is to spur on the spontaneity and energy of thought, and, without being taken literally, to strike sparks through a kind of intellectual short-circuiting that casts sudden light on the familiar and perhaps sets it on fire.

Adorno, 'Benjamin's Einbahnstrasse, in Notes to Literature, vol. ii

Benjamin is a connoisseur of city experience. In Naples, he notes, the living room spills out onto the street; in Paris, he will treat the street as his living room. Much of his work is composed in cafes. The non-linear layout of urban space, the ambush of advertising signs, and the unexpected encounter: these are incorporated into the work as principles of construction. The vehicles of incorporation are form and metaphor, which lift city experience from the world of empirical fact into the world of thought, thereby illuminating each in the estranging embrace of the other.