Modern production reduces directly lived life to mediated representation

Evidence

The disturbed relationship with the dead—forgotten and embalmed—is one of the symptoms of the sickness of experience today. One might almost say that the notion of human life as the unity in the history of an individual has been abolished: the life of the individual is defined only by its opposite, destruction, but all harmony and all continuity of conscious and involuntary memory have lost their meaning. … Individuals are reduced to a mere sequence of instantaneous experiences which leave no trace, or rather whose trace is hated as irrational, superfluous, and “overtaken” in the literal sense of the word. … History is eliminated in oneself and others out of a fear that it may remind the individual of the degeneration of his own existence—which itself continues. The respect for something which has no market value and runs contrary to all feelings is experienced most sharply by the person in mourning, in whose case not even the psychological restoration of labor power is possible. It becomes a wound in civilization, asocial sentimentality, showing that it has still not been possible to compel men to indulge solely in purposeful behavior. … In reality, the dead suffer a fate which the Jews in olden days considered the worst possible curse: they are expunged from the memory of those who live on. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 185 (#expands, via linked claim)

The curious double position of the European, as participant-observer, makes it possible to experience the Orient as though one were the visitor to an exhibition. Unaware that the Orient has not been arranged as an exhibition, the visitor carries out the characteristic cognitive manoeuvre of the modern subject, who separates himself from an object-world and observes it from a position that is invisible and set apart. From there, as Pierre Bourdieu says of the modern anthropologist or social scientist, one transfers into the object the principles of one’s relation to the object and ‘conceives of it as a totality intended for cognition alone’. The world is grasped, inevitably, as though it were ‘a representation (in the sense of idealist philosophy, but also as used in painting or the theatre)’, and people’s lives appear as no more than ‘stage parts … or the implementing of plans’. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 115 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Spectacle is money that can only be looked at — Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 62; Scientific rationality reduces individual life to statistical ratios; Media’s pseudo-realism infuses everyday life with meanings that block direct experience — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 234 (+6 more)

Related

• Modern production society converts all lived experience into representations (similarity 0.88)
• Mass culture abolishes the individual’s lived history, reducing life to disposable instants (similarity 0.81)
• Under modern production, lived experience becomes representation and spectacle (similarity 0.81)
• Modern observers grasp the world as a representation rather than as lived reality (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Modern observers grasp the world as a representation rather than as lived reality #corroborates (0.85) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 115
• Mass culture abolishes the individual’s lived history, reducing life to disposable instants #expands (0.85) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 185
• Scientific rationality reduces individual life to statistical ratios #expands (0.82)
• Media’s pseudo-realism infuses everyday life with meanings that block direct experience #expands (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 234
• All systems of representation spatialize and thereby distort lived experience #expands (0.80) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 1293
• Modern shock experiences undermine the basis of traditional lived experience #expands (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 861