Mass culture abolishes the individual’s lived history, reducing life to disposable instants

Evidence

The disturbed relationship with the dead—forgotten and embalmed—is one of the symptoms of the sickness of experience today. One might almost say that the notion of human life as the unity in the history of an individual has been abolished: the life of the individual is defined only by its opposite, destruction, but all harmony and all continuity of conscious and involuntary memory have lost their meaning. … Individuals are reduced to a mere sequence of instantaneous experiences which leave no trace, or rather whose trace is hated as irrational, superfluous, and “overtaken” in the literal sense of the word. … History is eliminated in oneself and others out of a fear that it may remind the individual of the degeneration of his own existence—which itself continues. The respect for something which has no market value and runs contrary to all feelings is experienced most sharply by the person in mourning, in whose case not even the psychological restoration of labor power is possible. It becomes a wound in civilization, asocial sentimentality, showing that it has still not been possible to compel men to indulge solely in purposeful behavior. … In reality, the dead suffer a fate which the Jews in olden days considered the worst possible curse: they are expunged from the memory of those who live on. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 185

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the grief-as-wound motif in ‘On Sacrifice’ and to Adorno’s culture-industry thesis in this same book; also resonates with the reader’s broader theme of decorum toward corpses. — connects to: Racial stereotyping operates by eliminating history and reducing a people to a timeless essence. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the…, 101; Stripping a people’s sacred historical claims reduces them to disposable naked life; Cultural mass production renders people interchangeable copies stripped of individuality — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 113 (+6 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: Roots the culture-industry critique in the abolition of lived individual temporality — the death of autobiography is the mechanism of domination, not just its byproduct.
• BMF: The line about being ‘expunged from the memory of those who live on’ as the worst curse evokes the Underworld’s erasure of the dead in We (Zamyatin), where the state abolishes the personal history of the individual.

Broader Connections

• Capitalism failed to strip social life of historical consciousness embedded in culture #contradicts (0.85)
• Stripping a people’s sacred historical claims reduces them to disposable naked life #expands (0.82)
• Racial stereotyping operates by eliminating history and reducing a people to a timeless essence. #expands (0.80) — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 101
• Cultural mass production renders people interchangeable copies stripped of individuality #expands (0.78) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 113
• Repetitive standardized mass culture automatizes reactions and weakens individual resistance. #expands (0.75) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 213
• Mass reproduction’s erosion of the aura destroys experience rooted in tradition. #expands (0.72) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 629