Frank Kogan

but a lot of things are by implication no longer available -- the company of the makers, the social relations and intimacy of artist and audience (or in the case of benjamin's religious artefacts, of the community of first use, the sense that for exampke catholicism as the history of itself as an institution is a guarantor of Right Interpretation, of correct handling of the material leading to correct result...)

benjamin's argt is that in the era of mass-production this is OBVIOUSLY unobtainable -- we may want to be chums w.britney, some of us may delude we actually ARE, but there is inevitably (just by the numbers) a gulf for almost all of us: into our yearning for such gulfs to disappear, for connection to be possible once more across all the connunity, for loneliness and social division to be assuaged or dissolved, all kinds of Really Bad Politics hold court (i think this is benjamin's intuition, if not his explicit argument; an art which acknowledged this loss AND ALSO the value of the trade-off in the form of a democratic liberation from the oppressive past, a call for a GOOD politics out of an art practice which acknowledged its own shaping -- which is kinda routine-issue arts-and-crafts truth-to-materials modernism actually)

(and there's instantly a good strong counter-question how benjamin's or adorno's use of literary montage -- adorno called it "constellation"? -- operates as a self-revealing-hence-self-policing technique in this sense?)