A forgetting and Two Concepts

Abstract

This essay deals with three different topics. The first one is the virtual disappearance from the horizon of contemporary literary theory of the idea that art-works may desire to be autonomous. The politicization of critical approaches has led to the forgetting of the struggle strong texts carry out to be themselves. The essay's second part discusses the question of semiotic overproduction. Here it is proposed that under present conditions of linguistic production the qualitative debate of high vs. low culture may be replaced by quantitative one measured by the exposure to capitalist semiosis. In the last part, the concept of mediation through things, already developed in the bibliography on the culture industry, is approached in order to become its opposite. That things convert into media and media into things is not a proof of the achievement of contemporary culture, but a sign of the supremacy of industry.