Adorno, Barthes, and Benjamin

The way I read Theodor Adorno’s Culture Industry Reconsidered was at least partially as a response to Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility. I also read Roland Barthes’ Rhetoric of the Image that way. So I am going to try to elaborate the three in relation to each other. These are all three difficult texts, so there is a good chance that I am completely missing the point. As such, any comments of a critical nature are welcome (non-critical comments, as I shall show, are either fascist or conformist).