In the epilogue that Walter Benjamin wrote to his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" we read:
"Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving the masses not their right, but a chance to express themselves...The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life...All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war." [The italics are Kluge's.]
In this context Benjamin's aim was to develop a theory of film that would be of no use to fascist cinema, but valuable for a cinema of emancipation. In his essay he rigorously investigates the change in sensual perception that came about through the historical changes of the twentieth century. The new perception occurs, he says, "in absentmindedness," collectively, and "through force of habit." It corresponds, he claims, with a tactile kind of reception ("without thinking"); this kind of reception (similar to the way in which one furnishes a home and knows, even in the dark, where the obstacles and pathways are) offers a more direct kind of experience, is more revealing and less easily misused by third parties than the work of the mind (always of utmost importance in traditional Enlightenment thought). All of this he studied in action with movie theater audiences.
