Mass culture literalizes reification by making living people resemble objects

Evidence

The masks of the film are so many emblems of authority. Their horror grows to the extent that these masks are able to move and speak, although this does nothing to alter their inexorability: everything that lives is captured in such masks. As far as mass culture is concerned reification is no metaphor: it makes the human beings that it reproduces resemble things even where their teeth do not represent toothpaste and their care-worn wrinkles do not evoke cosmetics. Whoever goes to a film is only waiting for the day when this spell will be broken, and perhaps ultimately it is only this well concealed hope which draws people to the cinema. But once there they obey. They assimilate themselves to what is dead. And that is how they become disposable. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 137

Categorization

• DEFINE: ‘Reification is no metaphor’ is Adorno’s sharpest working definition of how mass culture extends commodity fetishism into the human body itself.
• BMF: The frozen-grimace mask as emblem of authority evokes the totalizing conformity of We’s numbered ‘mechanicals’ — but that is thematic overlap on a shared subject (social conformity), which does not qualify as a genuine cross-domain jump.
• XREF: connects to: Cultural mass production renders people interchangeable copies stripped of individuality — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 113; The reified circus body is the only negation mass culture preserves — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 651; Adorno saw quantifying culture as the reification typical of mass culture — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 664 (+1 more)

Related

• The reified circus body is the only negation mass culture preserves (similarity 0.84)
• Cultural mass production renders people interchangeable copies stripped of individuality (similarity 0.82)
• Mass culture makes audiences enact their own manipulation. (similarity 0.81)
• Adorno saw quantifying culture as the reification typical of mass culture (similarity 0.80)
• Mass culture standardizes the individual through modish technique packaging decayed contents (similarity 0.80)
• Mass culture perfects its technical presentation while the content remains fatuous and standardized (similarity 0.80)