Matter-of-factness itself has become an ideology of treating people as things.
Evidence
Instead of this, the straight line is now regarded as the shortest distance between two people, as if they were points. Just as nowadays house-walls are cast in one piece, so the mortar between people is replaced by the pressure holding them together. … In the form of the few sentences about the health of one’s wife that prelude the business discussion over lunch, the utilitarian order has taken over and assimilated even its opposite. The taboo on talking shop and the inability to talk to each other are in reality the same thing. Because everything is business, the latter is unmentionable like rope in a hanged man’s home. … Matter-of-factness between people, doing away with all ideological ornamentation between them, has already itself become an ideology for treating people as things. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 36
Categorization
- QUESTION: Adorno’s move — taking a virtue (directness, transparency, honesty) and showing how it inverts into brutality — is the signature negative-dialectic gesture; worth tracing how he pulls the inversion off each time.
- XREF: connects to: Truth-bearing worldviews become instruments of organized barbarism once wielded as power.; Unsourced universalizing verbs transform people into objects of a privileged observer.; Debunking old illusions becomes a new ideology that destroys their truth. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 685