Standardized production forces a compensating pretence of individualism

Evidence

When the feelings seize on exchange value it is no mystical transubstantiation. It corresponds to the behaviour of the prisoner who loves his cell because he has been left nothing else to love. The sacrifice of individuality, which accommodates itself to the regularity of the successful, the doing of what everybody does, follows from the basic fact that in broad areas the same thing is offered to everybody by the standardized production of consumption goods. But the commercial necessity of connecting this identity leads to the manipulation of taste and the official culture’s pretence of individualism which necessarily increases in proportion to the liquidation of the individual. Even in the realm of the superstructure, the appearance is not merely the concealment of the essence, but proceeds of necessity from the essence itself. The identical character of the goods which everyone must buy hides itself behind the rigour of the universally compulsory style. The fiction of the relation between supply and demand survives in the fictitiously individual nuances. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 82

Categorization

• DEFINE: The precise mechanism of pseudo-individuation: standardized production of identical goods compels the culture industry to manufacture individual nuances that conceal the identity.
• XREF: The prisoner who loves his cell prefigures identification-with-the-aggressor themes the reader will meet in the fascist propaganda essay. — connects to: Commodity fetishism in mass production dictates conventional human behavior — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 46; Cultural mass production renders people interchangeable copies stripped of individuality — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 113; Economic rationality reduces individuals to obstacles in the production process (+12 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that appearance proceeds of necessity from essence, not merely concealing it, is a dense dialectical move the reader must grasp to apply Adorno honestly.