There is a sense in which Adorno's account of the culture industry prefigures the encounter between Marxist and postmodernist social theory. Dialectic of Enlightenment describes a progressive reification culture in which normative traditions have been ruptured by the interjection of image technologies, truth has become a function of aesthetic representation, and the self has been reduced to a paranoid desire to be contemporary. The continued expansion of capital, in other words, is sustained by the reproduction of passive consumers who are incapable of seeing beyond the desires and satisfactions which are already provided for them by the great corporate monopolies. For Horkheimer and Adorno this cycle of mutual reproduction is virtually hermetic; for once the culture industry has taken hold of the masses, their perception is shifted away from the concrete forms of inequality which they inhabit towards the world of commodities from which they constantly seek satisfaction. The process of rationalization which capitalism undergoes in the twentieth century, therefore, is one which destroys the material foundations of class politics: for once the welfare state, technological production and the culture industry have combined to smooth out their experience of injustice and dissatisfaction, the masses are consigned to the comfortable repetition of their privatized desires. This account of the massification of desire, as I have indicated above, marks a fundamental departure from orthodox Marxism; for by insisting on the power of technologically produced culture to disarm the collective experience of social antagonisms, Horkheimer and Adorno effectively break the link between the self-consciousness of the masses and their material conditions of existence (inequality, injustice, patriarchal domination, racism, etc.).