Capital reabsorbed modernism’s cult of the new as commodity novelty

Evidence

By the late 1950s the homogenization of consciousness had become counterproductive for the purposes of capital expansion; new needs for new commodities had to be created, and this required the reintroduction of the minimal negativity that had been previously eliminated. The cult of the new that had been the prerogative of art throughout the modernist epoch into the period of post-war unification and stabilization has returned to capital expansion from which it originally sprang. But this negativity is neither shocking nor emancipatory since it does not presage a transformation of the fundamental structures of everyday life. On the contrary, through the culture industry capital has co-opted the dynamics of negation both diachronically in its restless production of new and ‘different’ commodities and synchronically in its promotion of alternative ‘life-styles’. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 62

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the concept of recuperation in situationist theory and to the later cooptation of counterculture described by Thomas Frank in The Conquest of Cool. — connects to: The demand for novelty paradoxically strengthens the conventions it appears to escape — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 100; Modernist art criticizes capitalism by mirroring commodity form rather than denying it — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 230; Capital both created and then liquidated the reality principle — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 83 (+10 more)
• SEED: Angle: how ‘novelty’ as an artistic value became the engine of planned obsolescence — a genealogy of the new from modernism to the iPhone release cycle.

Related

• Modernity’s cult of novelty masks a sameness produced by industrial reproducibility. (similarity 0.85)
• Capitalism sustains itself by recycling readymade archaisms, never creating the new (similarity 0.81)
• The culture industry is defined by repetition under a false formula of totality (similarity 0.80)
• The demand for novelty paradoxically strengthens the conventions it appears to escape (similarity 0.79)
• Capital’s dominance is the real message of every cultural product (similarity 0.79)
• A modernism absorbed into mass media serves the existing socio-economic structure. (similarity 0.78)
• Modernity’s novelty is the industry monetizing communion with exalted figures (similarity 0.78)