A collaborative plan to theorize mass culture was conceived but never published

Evidence

Adorno’s interest in having a detailed discussion of the problem was shown by his plan for a volume of essays on Art for Mass Consumption'. This was to combine Benjamin's essay on the work of art and his own essay on jazz with a social-theoretical essay by Kracauer on the detective novel, and works by Bloch and others, on, for example, architecture and illustrated magazines, along with a main introductory essay by Horkheimer. It was to present the first concrete (not schematic, in the manner of the Russian theoreticians) application of theory to the current form of so-called “culture”’. … As with so many other plans, this one was never carried out. As in so many other cases, the awareness of the problem and the need to discuss it were greater here than the resulting publications might suggest. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 233

Categorization

• XREF: The volume’s contents map the exact essay cluster the reader has already logged — Benjamin on mechanical reproduction, Adorno on jazz, Kracauer on the detective novel — and shows they were meant to appear together. — connects to: Horkheimer’s plan for interdisciplinary economic collaboration failed for lack of capable collaborators — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1318
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Horkheimer’s plan for interdisciplinary economic collaboration failed for lack of capable collaborators — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1318