In his footnote to this passage from the second version of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility’ (‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’, 1936), Benjamin refers us to the ‘phalansteries’, the “self-contained agrarian collectives” of Fourier’s socialist utopia. In the Fourier convolute of the Arcades Project, these are compared to the two main articles of Benjamin’s politics: “the idea of revolution as an innervation of the technical organs of the collective… and the idea of the ‘cracking open of natural teleology’” (AP, [W7, 4], 631). For Benjamin, art, in the form of film—the “unfolding &lt;result&gt; of all the forms of perception, the tempos and rhythms, which lie preformed in today’s machines”—thus harboured the possibility of becoming a kind of rehearsal of the revolution. “[A]ll problems of contemporary art”, Benjamin insisted, “find their definitive formulation only in the context of film” (AP, [K3, 3], 394). In this respect, it was the combination of the communist pedagogy and constructive devices of Brecht’s epic theatre that marked it out for him as a theatre for the age of film (UB, 1–25; Wizisla 2009).