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"The fragments of the actual passagewerk can be compared to the building materials for a house which has only just been staked out or had the foundation dug. ... The excerpts out of which the walls would have been erected can be found piled up beside the excavation. Benjamin's own reflections, however, would have produced the mortar to hold the building together.
...It was Benjamin's intention to bring material and theory, reference and interpretation, together in a new constellation different from any usual form of presentation, one in which all the weight would be on the materials and references and the theory and meaning should ascetically retreat into the background. He called the question "by which method it would be possible to combine enhanced clarity with the execution of the Marxist method" ... "a central problem of historical materialism" which he wanted to solve with his passagenwerk. The first step in this direction would be to adapt the principle of MONTAGE. In other words to erect large constructions out of the smallest, sharpest and most cutting BUILDING ELEMENTS. To discover even in the analysis of the tiny individual moment, the crystal of entirety. (According to Adorno, it was Benjamin's intention "to renounce all obvious interpretation, and to have the MEANING emerge solely through the SHOCKING MONTAGE OF THE MATERIAL. (...)
As the crowning glory of his anti-subjectivism, the main work should consist of nothing but references)."
Benjamin, Walter: Gesammelte Schriften, Frankfurt/Main 1972, Das Passagenwerk ( Bd.V.1 und V.2), V.1, p. 13)