Abstract

It has been over half a century since Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno published Dialectic of the Enlightenment and 17 years since Paul Piccone published “The Crisis of One-Dimensionality” in Telos. With the passage of time and the appearance of the 100th issue of Telos, it may be appropriate to review some of the major theses of the culture industry developed by Horkheimer and Adorno and amplified by Piccone's “artificial negativity” to see how they have weathered the cultural debates and the rise of postmodernism in the 1980s and 1990s, when daily life has become so totally aestheticized that the particular meanings of community and individual identity have lost all significance.