Mass culture standardizes the individual through modish technique packaging decayed contents

Evidence

With the liquidation of its opposition to empirical reality art assumes a parasitic character. Inasmuch as it now appears itself as reality, which is supposed to stand in for the reality out there, it tends to relate back to culture as its own object. The monopolistic hold on culture, which forbids anything that cannot be grasped, necessarily refers us back to what has already been produced in the past and institutes self-reflection. This is the source of that glaring and yet ineliminable contradiction between the presentation, elegant technical finish and modish procedures on the one hand, and the old-fashioned traditionally individual and culturally derived decayed contents on the other, the contradiction that is revealed in the standardization of what is individual. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 111

Categorization

• DEFINE: This passage furnishes the central mechanism: standardization of the individual arises from the contradiction between modish presentation and decayed inherited contents.
• XREF: Directly supplies the analytical engine the reader wants to run on post-Adorno culture: technical finish vs. culturally decayed content. — connects to: Mass-produced culture reduces individuality to a stamped counterfeit detail — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 117; Culture industry entertainment is engineered to return subjects to resigned drudgery — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1414; Every human society processes food using generations-old accumulated techniques — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 223