Walter Benjamin, etc.

I'm taking a class this fall at Southern (Southern Connecticut State University) in post-modern poetry and poetics. One of the readings this week is Walter Benjamin's 1935 essay that's translated as "The Work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction." I hadn't read it in about 30 years. Maybe, 35. Anyway, we're reading it because of its obvious connections to art in a digital age, which can be understood as an subsequent revolution in reproducibility. I had remembered that aspect of the essay, but had forgotten its Marxist basis and its Marxist interests. Fascinating that Benjamin sees Fascism as introducing aesthetics into politics and conversely sees Marxism as responding by introducing politics into art. For Fascists--read Capitalists, war becomes _the_ art form. Benjamin doesn't say this, but it seems the logical consequence of his analysis that for Marxists, art is revolution (not propaganda), an act of liberation (not of persuasion or coercion.) Many other pieces of the essay are fascinating and productive: the connection of the uniqueness of a hand-made object in its particular place and time--its authenticity, its authority, its aura--to ritual and magic or religion; the loss of the possibility of apperception by an individual of that authentic authority by being in the presence of the object's aura in the age of photography and film with the consequence that only _mass_ and not _individual_ responses are possible? Maybe. And so how to fit this with Paul Hoover's introduction to the _Norton Anthology of Post-Modern American Poetry_ with his discussion of the _avant-grade_ and the post-modern era? Benjamin's essay is certainly far stronger, more rigorous, more predictive or powerfully illuminating than Hoover's, which seems a facile re-hash of the conventional thinking about the avant-garde and post-modernism. Avant-gardists think of themselves as revolutionists, liberators (not necessarily Marxists, of course, but that is the usual drift of self-regard.) I'm pretty confused by the terms avant-garde and post-modern. I haven't read anything as clear about what they are as Benjamin's essay. I'll have to look around for good essays to clarify these concepts for me.