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Notes 217
Chapter 3

1 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1997),
although the majority of references are drawn from this transla-
tion, a number are taken from the new translation, Dialectic of
Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (2002).
2 For example, in terms of the status of the arts in mass media
society see Rosenberg and White’s Mass Culture: The Popular Arts
in American (1957), and their Mass Culture Revisited (1971).
3 See for instance ‘On the fetish character in music and the
regression of listening’ (Adorno 1991: 26–52).
4 Baudrillard’s various works suggest that contemporary consumer
society is irredeemably commodified to the extent that artistic
and aesthetic meaning is fatally flawed. He explores the society-
defining overarching nature of the commodity in such early work
as The System of Objects (1996b) (first published in 1968) and The
Consumer Society (1998) (first published in 1970), while in his later
work he explicitly addresses the implications of such a system for
art, for example, Art and Artefact (1997) and The Conspiracy of Art
(2005).

Chapter 4

1 See Ewen (1996, 1999, 2001) and Ewen and Ewen (1992).
2 This notion of fear reappears in Baudrillard’s reinterpretation of
Durkheim’s collective effervescence. The fear to be had in
collective rituals has been replaced by the thrills to be derived
from the operational categories of the culture industry (see
Merrin 2005).
3 This tradition finds its earliest expression in Kapp’s Grundlinien
einer Philosophie der Technik ([1877] 1978) who argues for tel-
egraph cables as extension of nerve fibres, plates as hands and so
on, Marx likewise talks of cyclopean organs that reproduce the
motive action of the human worker. However, one of the earliest
and most profound meditations on this theme is to be found in
Butler’s Erewhon ([1872] 1970), a text known to McLuhan, as
revealed by his allusion to man as the reproductive organs of the
machine world. McLuhan thus argues that the writing and the
word is an extension of the eye, the wheel and the road the
extension of the foot, and electronics as an extension of the
nervous system, technology thus become a global body, uniting
humanity en masse (literally, ‘in a body’). Media abstract, repli-
cate and extend various sensory process and modalities, so that
they become not simply methods of perceiving the environment
but elements of the environment itself. Humanity here becomes,
in Freud’s memorable phrase, ‘a prosthetic god’.

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