Mechanical reproduction neutralizes conflicts before the viewer can experience them

Evidence

In so far as they made mechanization their privileged theme as it were, they attempted like Chaplin to play a trick on it and transform the shock of the eversame into a Bergsonian laughter. But mass culture falls victim to its pre-ordained fate inasmuch as it adopts its law and simultaneously obscures it. Mass culture treats conflicts but in fact proceeds without conflict. The representation of living reality becomes a technique for suspending its development and thus comes to occupy that static realm which revealed the very essence of variete. This can be seen in those sectors in which dynamic bourgeois art is subjected to adaptation. Simply by virtue of what it does to the original the technique of mechanical reproduction as such already betrays the aspect of resistancelessness. Whatever problems of psychological fate the film may present, through parading the events past the viewer on the screen the power of the oppositions involved and the possibility of freedom within them is denied and reduced to the abstract temporal relationship of before and after. The eye of the camera which has perceived the conflict before the viewer and projected it upon the unresisting smoothly unfolding reel of film has already taken care that the conflicts are not conflicts at all. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 121

Categorization

• XREF: Adorno’s claim that the camera ‘has already taken care that the conflicts are not conflicts at all’ resonates with Walter Benjamin’s mechanical reproduction essay and with the passive-consumption critique echoed in DeLillo’s White Noise. — connects to: Total visibility and memorialization destroy an object’s power to trigger involuntary memory — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 172

Related

• Preserving conflict in art now functions as romantic deception (similarity 0.78)