This seminar on the critical theory of the Frankfurt School undertakes a close examination of the textual debates between Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Siegfried Kracauer and others on questions of "aesthetics and politics," a body of often polemical socio-philosophical attempts to map a contemporary cultural landscape reconfigured by "culture industry," transformations in perception, the emergence of the mass, and new technologies of reproduction such as radio, gramophone, cinema, and television.