It is something of a platitude, although none the less true, to say that the post-war writings of the Frankfurt School sought to shift the emphasis of the critique of capitalism away from the economic base and towards the sphere of culture. With the publication of Walter Benjamin's account of the work of art in the age of technological reproducibility, the Institute of Social Research became increasingly concerned with the relationship between mass culture and the evolution of capitalism into a system of totalitarian control.¹ According to Benjamin the emergence of film marked the point at which the Western tradition of art — the "auratic" tradition which maintained that the genius of the artist lay in his ability to configure the transcendence of the object which he had depicted — was overtaken by the technological media through which the image is produced and disseminated. Art, in other words, loses its place within relatively stable traditions of authority, obedience and obligation and is transformed into a commodity which is designed for consumption by the masses (Benjamin, 1992: 220). For Benjamin the loss of aura in the technological processes of mass representation brought with it certain transformative possibilities; he argued that film, as a sensory-kinaesthetic register of the new forms of proletarian experience within the technological body of capitalism, offered a new resource to the political imagination of the masses. For both Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, however, the loss of aura which began with the emergence of film at the beginning of the twentieth century marks the point at which art and culture lose their independence from the reproduction of capital. Culture, in other words, becomes nothing more than the reproduction of mass conformity.