Politics & Power Quote by Alexander Kluge

Kluge is poking at a cozy modern superstition: that “democratized” communication is the same thing as good communication. The line carries the wary tone of someone who’s spent a career watching mass media promise openness while quietly standardizing what counts as legible. Once you start judging messages “more rigorously,” he suggests, you discover a friction people would rather deny: real precision creates barriers. Not everyone will follow. Not everyone will like it. A message sharpened into clarity can stop being instantly shareable, and that threatens the feel-good idea that publicity equals participation.

The subtext is almost a dare to the attention economy. Kluge refuses the contemporary bargain where accessibility is purchased by sanding down thought into slogans. “I have to say what I believe to be right” frames communication as an ethical act, not a popularity contest. It’s a filmmaker’s stance against the algorithmic impulse to optimize for reach.

Then he swerves: if rigor risks elitism, the answer isn’t to dumb down, but to multiply forms. “Spread out the statement among all the means of expression” reads like an aesthetic strategy and a political one. In Kluge’s world (New German Cinema, postwar media skepticism, the long shadow of propaganda), a single channel is a single point of capture. By dispersing an idea across film, text, montage, interviews, television, you make it harder to domesticate. The intent isn’t to make the message simple; it’s to make it resilient - complex enough to survive contact with the public without becoming just another consumable.