from that article on Benjamin...

...in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

On one level the Arcades can be seen to mark the furthest development of the shift — begun around 1924, where Fenves breaks off — away from philology and pure philosophy, and towards a new form of cultural history, both experimental and, in a complicated way, monumental. This entailed archaeology of modernity — its urban spaces, temporal structures, emergent media, dreamworlds of commodities and crowds — based on a much broader conception of experience and thought than normally accepted within philosophy’s walls.