Critical Theory & Aesthetics
About This Study Group
There is something at work in the world that has learned to eat art; not to destroy it outright, which would at least be legible, but to digest it slowly, to process it into a substance that resembles art closely enough to satisfy the appetite while providing none of the actual nutrition. It does this through mechanisms that are not new in their logic but are new in their reach: the capacity, now essentially total, to manufacture desire at scale, to make the engineered feel chosen, to circulate the simulacrum so thoroughly that the question of an original ceases to feel urgent or even quite real.
Current Assignment
Dialectic of enlightenment
Specified Selections (Chapters, episodes, pages, etc.):
- The Culture Industry
“The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” is one chapter from the five-chapter book Dialectic of Enlightenment, first appearing in 1944.
