Walter Benjamin

Today in class we discussed Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Benjamin writes of the new place of art post development of film. In wake of mass communication technology, much of the cult aura surrounding masterworks is shattered. Benjamin postulates that in this new world art would assume a central role, crucial to the very heart of politics.
What I found particularly fascinating was the impact of time and place in understanding Benjamin's writing. When I first began reading the article I had been under impression that the piece was first written in 1968. Thus when presented with talk of Marx (and especially Fascism at a later point) I began wondering how relevant the essay could have been even in its day. However I soon realized I had made a vital error in approaching Benjamin, and had to adjust to understand the time that had produced it.
The next hurdle to understanding came with knowing something about Benjamin himself. Walter Benjamin was a German literary critic. More specifically, he was a Marxist and a Jewish mysticist during a period of history when either could mean death in Nazi Germany. He would have thus had a naturally critical eye for Nazi activity during the 1930s. So we see the impact of place too on the author's writing.
As Benjamin came to realize, Fascism was a political movement that had fallen in love with technology. Hitler often rode in a Mercedes-Benz, the armies of Fascist nations paraded the most state-of-the-art weaponry, and Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will was the pinnacle of what mechanical reproduction could accomplish. It is from this last one that Benjamin undoubtedly came to understand the Fascist desire to aestheticize politics for the purpose of control. His arguments on mechanical reproduction are entirely shaped by his particular experiences. How do you think Barthes would respond to this assumption? What about Foucault?