Adorno's Minima Moralia
an "explicit commentary on the estrangement of mass publics," per Warner (132)
"He sees the way the expansiveness of mass circulation affects and distorts a desire for social membership on the part of readers" (134)
"people know what they want because they know what other people want" (Adorno)
Warner's summation: "social currency promises them the wides possible belonging [...] The tastes and ideas that become those of the majority do so because people need to believe that their tastes and ideas will be widely shared. The result is a kind of invisible power for dominant norms" (aka ideology)
"Adorno equates alienation with an imitative style of mass comprehension that defensively resists the unpredictability of thought [...] [T]he problem with the currently dominant manner of reading is that its imagination of value is controlled by people's tacit calculations about the numbers of readers with whom they will be in alignment."