Bureaucratic research work embodies the theoretical elimination of all meaning.

Evidence

The worst thing is that in that sort of enterprise you don’t basically know what you’re doing there or what is expected of you. This is to a certain extent the practical expression of the theoretical elimination of all meaning: the enterprise in which we are only able, ultimately, to see ourselves as a means towards the end of scientific discovery, even in connection with `projects’, is for these people more or less an end in itself, and basically we are no more capable of understanding them than they are of understanding us. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 394

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Adorno turns his own career misery at the Princeton Radio Project into a thesis about instrumental reason: the organization of research is itself the administered world in miniature.
• SEED: Angle: ‘The end-in-itself project’ — how project-based academic labor reproduces the very reification critical theory diagnoses.
• XREF: Connects directly to later chapters on the culture industry and the administered world (Eclipse of Reason, Dialectic of Enlightenment).