Mass-produced wholes and details share a prearranged, inorganic harmony

Evidence

The whole inevitably bears no relation to the details—just like the career of a successful man into which everything is made to fit as an illustration or a proof, whereas it is nothing more than the sum of all those idiotic events. The so-called dominant idea is like a file which ensures order but not coherence. The whole and the parts are alike; there is no antithesis and no connection. Their prearranged harmony is a mockery of what had to be striven after in the great bourgeois works of art. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 97

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines how the industry’s ‘unity’ ironically is the absence of real formal relation — mere file-order rather than coherence.