The demand for novelty paradoxically strengthens the conventions it appears to escape

Evidence

The constant pressure to produce new effects (which must conform to the old pattern) serves merely as another rule to increase the power of the conventions when any single effect threatens to slip through the net. Every detail is so firmly stamped with sameness that nothing can appear which is not marked at birth, or does not meet with approval at first sight. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 100

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A tight paradox — novelty-seeking as a convention-reinforcement mechanism — that resists one-sentence compression.
• XREF: Connects to the standardization argument that Burns builds on; the ‘new effect that conforms to the old pattern’ is the engine of mass-culture pacification. — connects to: Postmodernism’s rejection of innovation still depends on the very notion of novelty. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 276; The modern pursuit of novelty destabilizes fixed social and legal boundaries; Commodity exchange reduces difference to identity through endless novelty — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 548 (+10 more)

Broader Connections

• avant-garde shock loses its subversive force once it becomes expected and institutionalized #corroborates (0.95) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 564
• Postmodernism’s rejection of innovation still depends on the very notion of novelty. #corroborates (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 276
• Cultural stasis is constant novelty without ordered sequential change #corroborates (0.82) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 18
• Modernity’s cult of novelty masks a sameness produced by industrial reproducibility. #corroborates (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 257
• Capital reabsorbed modernism’s cult of the new as commodity novelty #corroborates (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 62
• Postmodernists borrow modernism’s features to claim a false novelty #corroborates (0.80) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 128
• Mass competition for uniqueness on uniform platforms undermines the authenticity sought #corroborates (0.80) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 135
• Commodity exchange reduces difference to identity through endless novelty #corroborates (0.78) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 548
• Entrenched formal expectations prevent critics from recognizing genre innovation. #corroborates (0.78) — Philip Chase Bobbitt, Reflections Inspired by My Critics, 581
• The modern pursuit of novelty destabilizes fixed social and legal boundaries #qualifies (0.72)