Social Commentary + Post-Ideological Art

"An absent minded aesthetics seems not to be entirely pejorative for Benjamin but almost a way to approach art unideologically, thereby depoliticizing art, undoing the conundrum of automatic war, for increasingly automatized societies." -Dave

I'd like to build off of Dave's post by segueing through Courtney's comment in class about how different Benjamin's Epilogue was from the rest of "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."
The Epilogue makes explicit the assumptions and goals underlying Benjamin's arguments about art. He indicates his Marxist position in the Preface, but these more obviously political passages bookend the essay, reflecting upon and emanating out from the philosophical content. The structure of the essay provides contexts - past, present (1936), and future (today) - for concepts such as "authority" and "exhibition value." This framework encourages a Marxist application of his concepts.
What probably most troubles Benjamin about art is that while "[t]he masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property." The new media of the first third of the twentieth century had the potential to be the "expression" of "the masses" under fascist rule, but Benjamin considered this expression to be neutered. This type of expression is unaware of its political potential.
An argument that Slavoj Zizek makes repeatedly is that when a society considers itself to be beyond ideology, it is really at its most ideological. The assumption that the mechanical reproduction of art is natural, or that deciphering the hero in war films (for example) should be obvious, is the epitome of ideology. Purely aesthetic expression or art, which lacks social consciousness, mediates the unacknowledged or unchallenged beliefs of society.
Benjamin indicates that media have a direct influence on ideology: "During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity's entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well" (III). Ignorance of a perspective or lifestyle's (for lack of a better word at the moment) historical grounding is a consequence of naturalizing that perspective. Then that natural perspective prevents any other - Communist, in this example - from gaining legitimacy.
This is exacerbated by the reception that media such as film receives. Instead of experiencing live theater, "The audience's identification [in the twentieth century] with the actor is really an identification with the camera" (VII). Not only does the audience submit itself to the "perspective" - Benjamin's word has parallels to "ideology" - of the camera, but it is also created by the camera, as Burke and Briggs have indicated. While we are informed that the marketing of films pandered to various audiences, films also created a mass audience - everyone who watches movies uncritically. This audience was and still is unaware of its historically and politically specific perspective. It has naturalized the perspective of the camera, and it makes mechanically reproduced art purely aesthetic. That is the expression allowed under fascism.
The purely aesthetic, or post-ideological, path leads to war because it is consumed by the consequences of ignoring art's political potential. By choosing to ignore the political aspect of art, the artist does not create art for art's sake. The artist unwittingly reaffirms and legitimizes the state of things, the current hegemonic system. Even in the aspiration to avoid participation in politics, the work of art has political ramifications regardless. It is this non-participation (that Zizek advises, although I'm not so sure) that leaves politics in the hands of those already in power. When Benjamin says, "War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system," he is prophesying that the perpetual war of the twentieth century - what Philip Bobbitt (a conservative historian) calls "The Long War" and Gore Vidal disparagingly catalogs in "Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace" - would proceed in the absence of sufficient resistance to such violence.