ABSTRACT
Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno is together with Walter Benjamin the most famous figure of the Frankfurt School. Adorno is even infamous for his downbeat readings of mass cultural phenomena, which his critics would like to dismiss as Eurocentric phobicity toward the innovations of popular multicultures. It is indicative (if not symptomatic) of his strong ties with Freud’s science that (not unlike Jacques Lacan at the same time) he should have taken on the thought-driving position of negative-transference object. His well-known pronouncements on art and “the culture industry” (mass media culture by another name) are always at some gut level strategically and provocatively unpopular.
