The attention to meshes of uninterrupted enjoyment provided by the cultural industry

Abstract

Considering that the expansion of the use of new technologies in the educative process occurs in a historical and social context each time more guided by and for the mode of production of goods, this article approaches how the usage of these apparatuses in the process of education and learning have been acting on the people’s capacity to direct and keep their attention to what they study. Being based on the Critical Theory of Society, there is a hypothesis that claims that the very intense bond between people and these apparatuses has been redounding, among other things, in the weakening of the people’s capacity of directing and controlling their own attention during certain period of time. This way, the article resumes Marx’s explanations on the concept of goods, associating what he defi ned as Fetishism with the Idea of Sovereign, discussed by La Boétie; approaches like the mode of goods production in the capitalism progressively subordinates the culture and the autonomous spaces of production of the spirit to the logical exchange, shaping what Adorno and Horkheimer called Cultural Industry. From the understanding that the products of the Cultural Industry explore the perception providing, obtained at the cost of immobilization of the exercise representation and thought, the article ends with notes about how these experiences have been impairing people’s capacity of dedicating and conducting their own attention and concentration.

Key words: Cultural Industry, attention, educative process, enjoyment.