Modernity’s cult of novelty masks a sameness produced by industrial reproducibility.
Evidence
The cult of the new, and thus the idea of modernity, is a rebellion against the fact that there is no longer anything new. The never-changing quality of machine-produced goods, the lattice of socialization that enmeshes and assimilates equally objects and the view of them, converts everything encountered into what always was, a fortuitous specimen of a species, the doppel-gänger of a model. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 257
Categorization
- XREF: Echoes Walter Benjamin’s work on mechanical reproduction and the decay of aura; connects to the ‘reduction to the specimen’ theme in Marx’s commodity fetishism. — connects to: The culture industry is defined by repetition under a false formula of totality; Mass-produced culture reduces individuality to a stamped counterfeit detail — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 117; Technology’s unification of all arts will expose the identity behind industrial culture (+7 more)
- DEEPTHINKING: The paradox that the fetish of the new is itself a symptom of the death of novelty — the compulsive return of the old in traumatic form — is a dense, paradigm-shifting core of the critique of modernity.
- ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to ‘Grafting & Growth’: Adorno’s claim that the ‘same’ converts everything into a fortuitous specimen of a species parallels the essay’s treatment of grafting as iteration of the same.
Broader Connections
- Capital reabsorbed modernism’s cult of the new as commodity novelty
#expands(0.85) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 62 - Postmodernism’s rejection of innovation still depends on the very notion of novelty.
#expands(0.78) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 276 - Postmodernists borrow modernism’s features to claim a false novelty
#exemplifies(0.75) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 128 - NFT art substituted technological novelty for artistic tradition and merit
#exemplifies(0.70) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 729